Of the Wretched
by YellowFlicker
Summary: On another earth… Maybe we are happy there.
1. Chapter 1

_Ok, so this has been in my draft for months, ever since I saw the gifset that inspired this little story (link at the end of the story - ALL credit goes to remember3x20 for this idea) and I decided to post it because I tried to write more but couldn't so I thought, what the hell, just let this one go. Anyway, I was just so in love with the idea of this AU that i had to write something, so here it is._  
 _Enjoy._

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"Le monde a soif d'amour —tu viendras l'apaiser.  
 _The world is parched for love —you will come and quench its thirst."_

 _\- Arthur Rimbaud, excerpt of 'Soleil et Chair'_

Felicity slumped even more in her seat.

Thea was asleep in hers, looking pale, her forehead covered in a thin layer of sweat. Felicity looked at her for long beats, thought back at the way she'd seen her stumble back and fall when the bullet went through her. How for one short, heart-stopping moment, Felicity had seen the blood and had thought.

She looked away, but there was nowhere she could look that wouldn't remind her of the last hellish week she'd had. Her brain wouldn't stop wheeling. Sometimes she wished she could just forget things, but she hadn't been made that way.

God, she was exhausted. They'd been in the air for almost twelve hours, jumping from airport to airport under five different identities. When Felicity dared to think that Moira had arranged all this she felt her stomach roll.

That woman was…

Felicity rubbed the tips of her fingers against her eyelids. She was sorely hoping that Moira Queen and Amanda Waller would never ever meet, or there would be no hope for mankind. And really, it wasn't like Felicity had much to say here. She'd been complicit to some very questionable things happening in the later year and a half of her life, so…

The worst of it was that she wasn't even sorry. And she was sure that a certain someone stepped into her office again, asking for her help, she would do it all over again and not change a thing.

Ok, so maybe she would do _some_ things better, maybe more efficiently. But for someone who knew so well the bitter bite of regret, when it crawled in her bed during her many sleepless nights, Felicity was happy to say that she didn't regret her choice at all.

The thought was a bit chilly. Felicity didn't know what that said about her.

Maybe she and Moira had more in common than their cool relationship had ever allowed them to share. Who knew? At this point, Felicity was sure she would never find out.

She got up and walked down the narrow lane of the plane, to where the coffee lived. Her legs were numb and when she got up they hurt. She needed to make her peace with this situation, one way or another. She needed to accept that she was an international fugitive now. That she was being smuggled across the world and into a literal Secret Assassin base.

Her life hadn't made sense by normal standards for a while, but this took the fucking cake.

Her hand shook as she poured the coffee. It spilled.

Felicity put the thermos down hard and then winced. She held very still, not even daring to breathe, listening if the noise had stirred Thea out of the first quiet sleep she'd had in hours. It hadn't.

Thea had the senses of a wild cat usually, but she'd been beyond exhausted. After all, it's not every day that your father is exposed as the city's vigilante and your name hits the papers as his fast-footed sidekick, along with you ex sister in law. No, things like those didn't really happen every day, not even to them. Neither did car bombs and an almost-assassination.

Robert had gotten Thea out of the way quickly enough that day, but the bullet had still lodged in her shoulder. She was alive now only because Robert knew his way around stopping any kind of bleeding that wasn't fatal, and because that crazy old man had dared to perform an emergency transfusion on his daughter when he'd realized she would die of poisoning and not of the bullet. Right there in lobby of Queen Consolidated he'd opened a vein and given Thea his very blood to save her life.

Felicity slid down the wall and pulled her knees up, hid her face against them. She still had tremors from that particular memory.

No, her life wasn't ordinary at all. And she'd been happy with that. She just wished she knew how to deal with _this_ too.

She'd been trying for the last twelve hours. Even as she settles on the soft carpeted floor of the plane, she still had no answer.

Nanda Parbat meant the Mountain, apparently. Or something. It sure wasn't an easy trek getting there though. The heat alone was enough to melt the skin beneath their clothes. The fact that they had to walk uphill under that baking sun was just the cherry on top of the shitcake.

Thea heaved Felicity held her wais more securely though she was out of breath herself.

"Just a little further." Digg reassured them, as he walked ahead, a gun on this hand and the GPS tracker mapping their position on the other. "According to the coordinates Robert gave us, we're almost two miles away."

Felicity looked at Thea, took in the pallor of her face and the dots of sweat on her forehead and told her to stop. She helped the other girl sit down for a while.

"John."

Digg turned, took one look at Thea and was by her side in a moment, lips pursed, almost angry.

"Queen stubbornness." he muttered, as he took the girl's pulse. "Why didn't you say something?"

The huffed a laugh. "I'm fine."

"Yeah you sound like it."

Thea just took another raspy breath, closing her eyes as if the effort required concentration. Felicity felt the twinge of guilt growing more insistent. She should have noticed.

"Ok. I feel better now." Thea said thickly. "I can walk some more."

Digg put a hand on her shoulder.

"I don't think so." And then he smiled for the first time in a few days. "How do you feel about piggy back rides, Speedy?"

Thea's eyes glazed over and she closed them, shaking her head minutely. Felicity knew what she would say before the words were even out of the girl's mouth.

"Ollie used to piggyback me around the house all the time."

Digg nodded. "Then you know the rules."

He turned, bending his knees so she could climb on his back. It must be a measure of the pain she was in that she looped her arms loosely around John's neck and shoulders and let him pick her up without the smallest protest.

John got up as if he didn't feel her weight at all. To be fair, Thea _was_ tiny, but Felicity knew that the girl was no feather. She looked lanky but she was all muscle and deadly knees and elbows.

John passed Felicity the GPS tracker. They kept moving, sweating though every layer of clothing they were wearing.

After some twenty minutes of walking, Thea piped up.

"You ok, John?"

John only chuckled. He was hardly out of breath.

"Give me a break, kid. I've carried gear through the dessert that weighted twice more than you do."

Thea said nothing, but as she turned her face to rest her cheek against John's shoulder, Felicity could see her little smile. It wasn't even 20 minutes later however, that an arrow ebbed itself right in front of John's feet.

They stopped. From a distance, the people up in the hill looked like flickering shadows but the projectile weapon embed at their feet meant they were very much real people.

"You may go no further," a booming voice said, the tilting accent doing nothing to hinder Felicity's understanding of the words.

She stepped forward. This was her part now.

"My name is Felicity Smoak," she said, as loudly and steadily as she could. "This is John Diggle and Thea Queen. We were told our coming here was expected."

She didn't know whether to be relieved or not when the men on the hill looked among each other and put their weapons down. As it was, they had run out of choices days ago, so there was nothing they could do but to follow when they were told to do so.

Felicity felt dizzy once or twice as they walked up the narrow paths up the mountains. She tried very hard never to glance over her shoulder - the drop was so deep and sharp that Felicity couldn't see the bottom of the canyon. The abyss seemed to call at her with its own force of gravity.

God, she _hated_ heights.

Once they got close enough, they could see the League stronghold through the fog. It was a building, a castle of sorts, but it looked like it had been carved right into the face of the mountain.

She saw him just as they stepped inside the castle's walls.

Even when Moira had mentioned him by name, laying out their plan to get her and Thea out of the country and somewhere safe enough, Felicity had told her she'd believe it when she saw it. And now _he_ was standing _right there_. She was seeing it - seeing _him_ – and still Felicity could hardly make sense of it all.

She'd asked herself along the way why a League of psychotic murders was considered anywhere near safe. But as she met Malcolm Merlyn's eyes in that hall so big she couldn't see the ceiling of… she believed.

"Felicity. It is good to see you after so long." he said as he stepped forward, long black robes flowing behind him.

"Malcolm. It hasn't been nearly long enough, so I really can't say the same."

He chuckled, though his eyes were cold. The smirk fell off his face though, when he saw Thea being carried in by John and laid into an awaiting stretcher.

The words Malcolm spoke in Arabic were completely foreign to Felicity but they made two men move as if his voice commanded them. When they grabbed Thea's stretcher and made to carry her away, Felicity and Diggle moved to follow them. There was no way in hell - and she might very well be _in_ it - that Felicity was leaving Thea alone in this godforsaken place.

"You have not been dismissed." Malcolm said simply and just like that, a blade was at her throat. Felicity almost walked right into it, but Diggle pulled her backwards.

Felicity turned burning eyes to her once-stepfather.

"I'm not interested in chitchatting with you about old times, Malcolm. Where are they taking her?"

"To the healing rooms, where she will be most carefully cared for."

"I don't believe you." She spit back, but the weapons at her throat didn't move and when Felicity tried to move despite the threat of the gleaming blade, Digg held her tighter. Those men would not relent, if Malcolm did not say so. It wasn't them that they had to deal with.

"What do you _want_ , Malcolm." Felicity asked, for the first time her voice showing her exhaustion.

"Why, nothing _you_ can give me, of course." he said, as if it wasn't by his orders that there was a fucking sword at her throat!

What even _were_ these people!

"Then let us go!" Felicity gritted out.

He might say that he wanted nothing from her, from them, but Felicity knew him well enough to know better. He wanted her to be very aware of who exactly was in control here.

"Of course. You will be escorted to your rooms."

"I will be escorted to wherever Thea is going to be. _That_ will be my rooms, thank you." Felicity said quietly. She'd learned to be quiet from him. At her most hateful, she always became quiet.

Malcolm's smile remained the same, but his eyes hardened. he stepped closer in her space. Diggle tensed.

"Felicity, you were always a bright girl, so I expect you to understand a very simple concept while you're here." He lowered his voice, softened his tone. His eyes remained as empty of real feeling as they'd ever been. "This is not a reenactment of your teenage years. You are in a foreign domain and you must show respect for its rules, or you will be punished accordingly."

"I will show you the respect you deserve, Malcolm." She replied coolly. "As I always have."

He sighed, shook his head in disappointment.

Felicity bit back her scowl.

He could go fuck himself. Tommy might have been more vulnerable to his manipulations, because Malcolm had started early with his emotional violence on his son, but Felicity was a different matter. She'd seen right through the fucker from the very first time she'd met him, even if her own mother hadn't.

"This is a different country, Felicity, a different culture." Malcolm explained, almost sounding patient. It only had made Felicity despise him more. "Do not be so thoughtlessly arrogant as to think that you can ignore its customs because you feel somehow superior to them. Here different rules apply."

She snorted. "You're as much of a foreigner here as I am, Malcolm. Don't talk to me about respect, you're one of the most racist people I've ever met."

Malcolm's lips pinched.

Felicity didn't understand what he said, but Digg did, so when two men moved to catch a hold of her arms, he fought back. He was put down within moments. Felicity screamed and kicked, but it did little difference. She was hauled away as if she weighted nothing, the grip of powerful hands so strong around her upper arms and wrists that she thought her bones would snap. She fought all the way to a set of double doors. They were opened and she was thrown in.

She almost faceplanted on the stone floor, but broke her fall with her hands and knees instead. Her glasses fell off from her face, landing a couple of feet from her. The impact hurt so much that she felt it vibrating all the way to her hips and shoulders. She pressed her face against the cool stone and let her body go. For a moment, she just wanted to lay there and sob her heart out.

But once she felt real tears gathering behind her eyes, she gritted her teeth and fought through them. She _ordered_ her bruised and exhausted body to get up, get up, _get up!_ until it obeyed. When she managed to stand she inspected herself. She'd scrapped her palms and knees bloody. Her jeans were torn at the knee. It was with an astounding amount of detachment that she observed this. She didn't particularly care.

She went to the door and pulled. It didn't give a single inch.

Felicity has known it would be locked. Malcolm had locked her in her room before. She'd broken her arm that time, when she'd fallen from the second story trying to scale out of the window instead.

 _Silver lining_ , Felicity thought as she rested her forehead against the hard wood: at least there are no broken bones this time.

Felicity felt her head spin as she stood there. She took careful stock of her own damage: she was battered, exhausted, had slept for only about three hours for the last forty-eight and couldn't even remember the last full meal she'd had. Dehydration was starting to make her head ache.

She needed to think. She needed…

She needed to clean up, Felicity decided. Drink some water, clean her face. Her hands and knees. She hadn't planned on sleeping, but she passed out on the couch she had sat on, just to think some. Next thing she knew, she was being gently shaken by the shoulder.

She startled awake, heart hammering. It was Digg's familiar face that she saw but she still tried to jump to her feet. Then she had to sit again, her head spinning and her vision darkening.

"Easy." John said as he pushed her down to the couch again. "You need to rest Felicity."

"I need to see Thea." She said, mind filled to bursting with the possibilities of what could have gone wrong with Thea as she slept away like the most careless caretaker on the planet. "Where is she? Do you know? Did they hurt you?"

"I just came from Thea's room." John assured her. "She's better, and sleeping. Her fever is down too."

"Where…"

"Two halls down from here, second door to the right. I'm right across the hall from you. No they didn't hurt me. You have to sleep. I'll take first watch."

Felicity blinked. Her brain felt slow.

She must have agreed at some point, but she didn't remember much of it. It felt like a dream. Next thing she knew, felicity's head was somewhere soft and she was out like a light again.

She didn't remember Diggle helping her up, though the sting of him cleaning up her cuts and bruises did stand out among the hazy memories. She was glad she didn't remember him helping her undress for bed, but maybe he hadn't. She didn't know. At this point it didn't even matter, weird as that sounded.

They'd known each other for years. He'd seen her bruised and bloody, and in elegant dresses alike. He'd helped her when she had a bomb around her neck and pulled her crying and shocked self out of a crumbling building when the Foundry almost fell on her. She'd even slept on his and Lyla's couch a few times and had breakfast with them in Yummy Sushi pajamas. The time when anything would make them hesitate when it came to taking care of each other were long gone… though Felicity thought they had to draw a line somewhere. She wondered what Lyla would think about her husband taking off another woman's clothes.

Lyla… Lyla who always found their 'done with your shit' faces hilariously alike. She said their mirror each other. Felicity could perfectly see her snorting about it.

Felicity wished she could be more like Digg when it came to resilience, but apparently her body's limits were way lower than his. Or Thea's, Robert's and Lyla's. She'd had no training for this, no preparation. She'd jumped head first into a dangerous situation and she'd made her way, same as she always did. But for the first time, hidden among mountains, Felicity wished she'd thought everything through better. That she'd made fewer mistakes.

She found herself wishing for strength that felt like it was fast running out.

The next day, Felicity didn't leave Thea's room for a moment. They had baths and dressed begrudgingly in the loose white robes that had been laid out for them, once they found out that their other clothes had been taken away. ( _she didn't admit they the soft cotton felt comfortable on her only because it had been given to her on Malcolm's orders. She was petty like that_ )

Felicity found that her tablet was missing too, but knowing that no matter how they tried, they would never be able to crack the security measures on her baby gave her a fierce kind of pleasure.

Thea was feeling better too. She'd been as astounded as Felicity had felt when she saw Malcolm. She didn't speak much to him, though Malcolm smile made her a bit uncomfortable. She tracked him the whole time he was in the room, as if she expected him to attack them at any moment. John did too, from the corner of the room, right behind Malcolm's back. Felicity had spent enough time around warriors to know when they were on their guard. Malcolm though looked as at ease as ever.

"I've always been very fond of you, Thea. I hope you recover well, and find your stay here pleasing."

That's what he'd said before leaving. Thea had just nodded. Once the door closed behind Malcolm, she turned wide eyes to Felicity.

"You know… I almost didn't believe mom when she said that he was here. That he was…"

"Head of the Demon." Felicity completed that thought when Thea seemed to stumble on the words. "Yeah, I didn't either. I'd hoped he was dead."

Thea didn't say anything to that. She didn't exactly share the more ruthless aspects Felicity's anger, but then again – and thank god – Thea didn't know Malcolm well enough to hate him the way Felicity did.

It was an intimate kind of hatred. One that you learned through details and through knowing all too well the subtle kind of violence a human being was capable of inflicting on another without ever lifting a finger. And that was just from her years of living with that man. But there were other things too.

Felicity had never been able to prove it and Robert had never fully believed her, but she had always suspected Malcolm had had something to do with what happened in the Glades five months ago. There had been too many coincidences for her to let it go, despite the fact that Malcolm and had been clean as a whistle and so had been Merlyn Global.

When they understood what the Undertaking actually meant, it had been almost too late. Felicity had been able to hack into the Unidac files and decrypt them, but not in time to find out there were two machines. Three hundred and four people had died. Tommy would always be in some kind of level of pain form the wound he took – that rebar that had almost run him through. But Malcolm had disappeared months before that. Nobody had seen or heard from him for almost a year. And now they were here, under his fucking roof again.

"You plan on going tonight to that thing he invited us?" Thea asked.

"I don't see how we have a choice." Digg said as he sat down on the ottoman close to the bed. "That didn't really sound like an invitation to me."

Felicity couldn't have said it better. "Let's keep our eyes open. Malcolm never does anything for nothing."

Thea huffs unhappily, her misery plain in her face. "What more could we have to give?"

Felicity looked away, heart aching. Thea was probably thinking of all she left behind. Of her father standing trial for fifty different accounts of murder. Of her mother being under investigation as an accomplice for that. If they lose the trial, Robert could be sentenced to death.

Thea had been so determined to stay. Felicity had been too, and they would have stayed, if the attacks on them hadn't started. Felicity would have been risking a lot more than prison if she'd stayed however. There had been three different attempts of kidnapping by the Triad alone since her name hit the press. One of them had almost succeeded on blowing up a floor of QC, just to create a diversion. Two of her researches had ended up in intensive care because of it.

They still didn't know who had leaked their identities.

For a moment, the thought came to her that it might have been Malcolm, but Felicity dismissed it. Malcolm had nothing to gain from exposing the Hood. He had nothing to gain from setting them all up so that Thea and Felicity herself could end up here, of all places.

But then again, Felicity didn't call herself an expert on the way a cold-hearted bastard's mind worked. And with Malcolm, one could never know.

If Felicity had been in that kind of mood, she would have said the hall where they had been ushered to looked a lot like Hogwarts' Great Hall, but a lot creepier. Flickering flames keeping the lighting so dim that the hall seemed more made of shadows than anything. Like everything else in this place, it was a trick to keep you on your toes. People who called themselves with a pretentious name like 'league of assassins' probably winning any prizes on subtlety of method.

She walked side by side with Diggle and Thea. They had both stuck to Thea's side, because - just as Diggle had promised Robert that he would watch out for his girls, even before the other man asked him to - Felicity had promised both Moira and her reckless husband that she would look out for their daughter. She'd promised Tommy and Laurel to look out for her own self too. Even when she'd felt like she'd lost everything else, Felicity had known that she wasn't alone. Her makeshift family was right there with her and they had to pull each other through this. That had been what had kept her sane these last few days.

When they picked a table on the far side of the room and sat on the cushions, Thea leaned a bit on Felicity's arm.

"How are you feeling?" Felicity asked immediately, her arm wrapping around Thea's shoulders to pull her closer.

"A lot better actually. I guess there people have experience handling bleeding wounds. I'm really starting to question my parents sanity for calling this a safe place though." she murmured.

"You shouldn't."

Both girls looked up, and saw Malcolm towering over them.

How prosaic of him. He used to love sitting her and Tommy down and walking back and forth in front of them as he spoke.

"This is the last place anyone will ever find you, no matter how powerful Robert's enemies may be."

"It's not exactly street thugs we're worried about, Malcolm." Thea said. Felicity squeezed her hand.

 _Don't tell him anything._

Thea bit her lip as Malcolm smiled.

"Oh, I know, Thea. I am glad you are feeling better, by the way. How is your shoulder tonight?"

Thea rolled said shoulder, rubbed her arm.

"Better," she admitted.

"Good. I'm glad. I wanted you to enjoy tonight. After all, this is the first chance I get to formally welcome you Nanda Parbat."

Felicity barely kept from rolling her eyes. He must be having the time of his life, ruling this place and having so many deadly people at his back and call. The thought both sickened and frightened her. Malcolm was the sort of man who should never be allowed to have any kind of power. The fact that he had so much of it made Felicity worry.

He left them alone after that and for a long time all they did was watch carefully as the League members went about their routines, and ate when the food was put before them.

Felicity watched everything with great detail. She took note of the way they dressed and the fact that all of them were armed. That she, Digg and Thea were wearing clothes of the same cut, but were the only ones wearing white. It was obvious that it was to determine their status, thought what that _meant_ , Felicity didn't know. She didn't know their customs.

She watched the way people walked up to Malcolm and bowed to him, watched who he talked to, for how long and even tried to read his lips. When he unexpectedly met her eye, as if he'd been aware of her scrutiny the whole time, Felicity was startled, but she stared back without blinking. She may be in his power here, but he knew very well that she despised him. There was simply no point in pretending otherwise. Malcolm smiled, sharp and joyless, and looked away, turning to talk to the woman by his side – the only one whose black robes were bejeweled.

Felicity felt the little hair on her arms rise. No, she didn't like being here at all.

It was almost two hours since they'd stepped into the main hall when the double doors that led into it opened and about twenty people, all dressed in the same way and heavily armed, strode in. Their faces were hidden beneath deep dark hoods, their weapons on their belts.

They stopped right in front of the dais where Malcolm was sitting, shoved their hoods down and put their hands on their chests, bowed their heads. The back of their heads were all that Felicity could see, but she paid attention anyway. The women had their hair bound in tight braids close to their head. Some of the men kept it loose and others had cropped it so short that they almost looked bald.

Not for the first time she marveled at the irony of their situation. They had gotten out of Starling – or of the continent - to be safe from people meaning to kill them, or worse, and _here_ they were, in the laps of even more ruthless killers. Felicity's brain had almost short-circuited for the last three days trying to understand this.

What had they been doing for more than a year? If _this_ was where they deserved to end up, then all that she had done, all those horrible things she had helped do, to admittedly horrible people… what had they been for? Did they even mean anything?

Was Amanda Waller right? Did they _deserve_ to be hunted like this?

Maybe they did. Maybe, if the only place where they could find safe haven was where Malcolm Merlyn dwelled, then they really had made a huge mistake and deserved everything that was coming to them.

This didn't change Felicity's determination to make it out of this alive and intact, but it did at least shift her point of view.

Thea leaned closer to Digg.

"What is he saying?"

Digg expression was opaque, but she knew him well enough to recognize the anger in his eyes.

"They're reporting a successful mission in Damascus, London and Dubai." Digg murmured. "He's formally welcoming them, and informing them that the Mountain has guests."

"What?"

"Us." Digg explained.

But Felicity wasn't really listening. She was still looking at all those people living in the shadows like this, doing a crazy man's will like he was their god.

It surprised her, the strength of her hatred for Malcolm. Felicity had probably never understood how much until that very moment. She'd hated him almost from the moment she'd met him and even gone so far as to sabotage him every time she thought she could get away with it, but this was different.

How could someone like him be allowed to have this much power? How _dare_ Robert not tell her about this before?

How…

"Oh my god..."

Felicity turned to Thea immediately. She sounded breathless and scared and even thought Felicity had had a thousand thoughts swirling in her heads, that tone would have caught her attention anywhere.

"What is it? What's the matter, Thea?"

But Thea's eyes were fixed in front of her, squinting. Felicity followed her gaze and she just… froze.

It was impossible. It was…

Felicity closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.

It had been years since this had happened to her. Literal years. She'd thought it would never happen to her again. She'd thought…

It must be the flickering light of the torches, yes. This was just… it was the light, and the exhaustion and the dread that curdled her every thought.

It wasn't real.

"It's not him Thea." Felicity said, utterly convinced. They'd had this problem for so long, both of them. Moira too probably, but Moira would rather die than admit that kind of weakness to Felicity. And anyway, Felicity had gotten over it quicker, by sheer strength of will but also because she wasn't strong enough to do what Thea did: be willing to look for him everywhere, each day with a new heart, like it didn't hurt.

No, she couldn't. So she hadn't.

But Thea was resilience personified. Her fingers tightened around Felicity's wrist. It hurt, but not as much as the frail hope in Thea's voice did.

"Felicity…"

Thea's eyes shone with emotion even, shock slackening her face, making her into a 12 year old kid that had just lost her brother and father in one stroke again.

"Thea, _please_. It's not…"

"Stop! Just _look_ at him!"

"Felicity…" Digg's soft voice made her heart drop.

Thea might have made a mistake, she sometimes did, and Felicity might have built the self-protecting inertia of not believing her, but _John_ … John had no reason to see ghosts.

Felicity turned her head, looked straight to where that man had been a moment ago.

He wasn't there.

"To Malcolm's right." Thea directed her immediately. And that's when Felicity saw him. _Truly_ saw him.

Saw the line of his jaw and his close-cropped hair; the gleam of a gem in his ear; his pale face, the deep set eyes and the circles beneath them like dark smudges. She saw his asymmetrical eyebrows and that mole on the corner of his mouth; the lips that she'd kissed and never forgotten, because her mind refused to let her forget anything, even when she hated herself for it.

She saw him, a ghost standing there just a few feet from her in a dark room and the world just… shifted on its axis and she fell off the face of it.


	2. Chapter 2

_"'Aren't you afraid of my darkness, my dear?' Hades asked with mischief in his eyes._  
 _'No,' Persephone replied, 'You haven't even seen mine yet.'"_

\- _kfg_

Felicity saw Thea get up and start walking forward as if in a trance. She was so shocked that she didn't even try to stop her, though later on Felicity will think perhaps she should have. She didn't notice how most of the all the other people in black filing out of the wide hall either. They were as silent as the shadows they blended with and admittedly, Felicity might have missed their movements even if she had been paying attention. Which she was not. Not even close.

She couldn't hear a thing over the deafening rush of her blood in her ears, as if she was standing too close to a violent river.

Maybe they weren't silent. Maybe she just couldn't-

This wasn't real. It couldn't be.

He'd died. Robert said so. He had stood in Queen Mansion's very polished living room, looked at his wife and daughter dead in the eye and told them that Oliver had died at sea. That he drowned in that godforsaken storm.

He had come into her office…

Felicity felt rage starting to bubble up, irrational and hot in her gut, making her hands shake. God, she'd always known that Robert wasn't the best of men – not even close - and she had known all too well how hard it used to be between him and Oliver, but she couldn't believe he could have been so… so deliberately cruel. If there had ever been even the smallest chance that Oliver had lived, he should have told them. He should have told them! Everything!

But instead the fucker had come into her _office_ , where she had felt safest and most comfortable. He had stepped into her space in broad daylight and _lied to her face_!

 _If the people of the great American nation don't put you to death, I will ruin you myself, Robert_!

He'd sounded so calm. So fucking sorrowful.

' _The last time we talked… the very last time, he spoke to me of you_.'

Felicity hadn't been able to bear it then, same as it was pressing on her ribcage too heavy for her to breathe through it now.

' _Did he suffer_?'

It had seemed so important, somehow… And Robert's eyes, so kind. ( _maybe they had just seemed that way because she'd tried to see Oliver in them. So stupid. Oliver had never been anything like his father, ever_. _He would have been so disappointed in her._ ) Felicity had thought she was able to tell a lie apart from a truth when she heard one, but apparently she'd never met a more ice-veined liar than Robert Queen. Unlike Malcolm, who possessed no feeling and the absence of it was always a scream alerting her to his lies, Robert was something different.

He was very much capable of feeling, and he used honest emotion to do dishonest work.

' _No, sweetheart_.' A small shuffle of his feet, in a way that was painfully alike to Oliver's. She'd had to look away. She wondered now if he'd done that on purpose, just to unbalance her. ' _Felicity… I'm so sorry. I know it's not the right time, but I need your help_.'

And she had helped.

She'd been such an idiot. Fuck her MIT degree and her bullshit-meter. She was the most hopeless loser of them all. Such an easy target.

Felicity tried to blink through her tears, tried to shake herself out of it. She pinched herself hard and it hurt! Thea had kept moving. Digg too was getting up, but Felicity just couldn't. She could barely even feel her feet at all, let alone stand on them.

Thea was shaking. Felicity could see it all the way from where she was sitting.

"Ollie…"

He looked straight at his sister's face, right into her wide eyes.

Not to flicker of recognition crossed his.

Felicity felt a cold shiver rip up her spine. A man was standing there, yes. A man with Oliver Queen's face. But she didn't know more than that.

And it was that thought that propelled Felicity forward. She got up a bit too fast, scrambled to her feet and hurried to Thea's side, took the other girl's hand to stop her.

Heavy tears were running down Thea's face, her hand was clammy and she looked pale. Felicity felt like a sand castle herself, shaking in front of the oncoming waves.

"Ollie, it's Thea…" her voice shook and she tried to reach out to him, but both Digg and Felicity tugged her backwards. The look of utter betrayal that Thea send her stung a bit, but Felicity steeled herself against it.

"We don't know what's going on yet, Thea. Let's just…"

Thea tugged her hand out of Felicity's grip, as if those hands that had so often offered solace and comfort were poison now.

"That's _Oliver_. He's three feet from you and you're still going to deny it?"

Felicity looked away from Thea to Oliver. He was so silent and still, looking straight ahead. She wanted her eyes to pound at his face as hard as her thoughts her hammering against the inside of her forehead, ' _Look at me! Look at me!_ ' but he didn't. He didn't even blink. He just stood there.

"I wanted you both to be here tonight because I was sure that Oliver would return, and I wanted you to meet again."

"You… You what?" Felicity said, the words falling out of her own mouth as if she didn't grasp them at all. Thea kept calling her brother's name, completely focused on him. Felicity found it was easier to just look at Malcolm.

"I know that you were unaware of Oliver's survival. The moment I could, I wanted to change that."

Felicity narrowed her eyes at him.

 _Bullshit_.

"Why isn't he answering me?" Thea asked, and then stepped closer, her voice growing deeper, more threatening. "What have you done to him?"

"I have done nothing." Malcolm said calmly. "I have only been Ra's for a very short time. Whatever happened to Oliver before I was here wasn't my doing and I had no control over it."

Felicity just shook her head. Her mind was working furiously, piecing all that had happened together trying to find a pattern that would tell her a new story. Something that they had been missing till now, something…

Malcolm spoke and Oliver, along with the men and women at his sides started walking out. Thea gasped and immediately reached for her brother, calling his name again.

Felicity saw it all happening before it even unfolded. It was the kind of bad feeling that one gets when one is too smart not to always guess the right answer.

"Thea, don't!"

But it was too late – they were already on her, grasping at her arms to keep her from touching her brother. The brother that didn't turn when she yelped and then growled at the man holding her. Even though pale and missing the dark makeup she usually wore, she looked fierce as ever. Thea bared her teeth, curled her legs up to gather momentum and then threw her whole weight forward to unbalance the man holding her. She elbowed him in the side, slammed the back of her head hard against his face and broke the arm that had been holding her as she untangled herself. She probably tore at her stitches in the mean time, Felicity noted absently, as Digg took down the other man that tried attack Thea behind her back. They stood no chance. There were too many of them.

Thea screamed Oliver's name and it came back to her an empty echo, as she was shoved to her knees. Her sob as the man behind her pulled at her injured arm crawled right beneath Felicity's skin and _singed_.

She didn't think. This was a zero sum game anyway, and Felicity had realized that before any of this unfolded. She threw herself on the man holding Thea down and scratched her uneven nails down his face, pressing against the squishiness of his eyes until he screamed.

The last thing Felicity saw before a something very hard connected with the side of her head, was Oliver's half-turned face and the impassive look on it.

Felicity felt the pain before she even opened her eyes. Her head was throbbing so hard she could feel her heartbeat on her forehead, splitting her skull in a straight line from there and down the back of her head.

She groaned, and immediately felt John's hand on hers.

"It's ok," he said, voice low. Felicity tried to nod, but it heightened the sharp hurt, so she gave up on that and squeezed Digg's hand a bit tighter instead. She opened her eyes slowly.

"Where's Thea?"

Digg sighed. "Sleeping. They gave her some sort of sedative after they knocked you out. …I'm so sorry, Felicity."

Felicity sighed and tried to pull herself to a sitting position.

"Don't be sorry for anything John. There was nothing you could have done." She said as she felt the split on her lip. The whole left side of her face felt on fire.

She'd never been hit by someone's fist before.

Felicity eyed the room, Thea's sleeping form beside her in the bed and the black eye that was swiftly swelling up on Digg's face.

She knew what she had to do… but she was scared. So fucking afraid to take that step. There was anger there, crawling along her veins too. At being outsmarted, manipulated. Lied to. Fucking punched unconscious.

But she couldn't hold on to that either. She needed clarity right now.

"There's someone at the door, isn't there?"

Digg seemed surprised by her question but he nodded. "As if we have any chance of going anywhere."

Felicity shook her head. "That's not why he's there."

She swung her legs on the side of the bed. The cold stone made her bare toes curl in.

"Felicity…"

"I have to talk to Malcolm." Felicity said without preamble.

Digg's incredulous frown was all too apt, Felicity knew. But she had a reason.

"And say what?"

"We didn't end up here by chance John. I don't believe that anymore. And I have to find out why now." Digg's face was clouded over by confusion, but Felicity took his hand. "Trust me."

"I do. But I don't see how this could help. He's already hurt you twice, I don't want him anywhere near any of us."

Felicity smile joylessly. It hurt. "Too bad we're stuck in here then, huh."

x

He was waiting for her at a table set for two. Felicity wasn't surprised in the least.

"Felicity."

She still hated the way he said her name.

She sat down before he could ask her to. A muscle at the corner of his jaw twitched. Absently she wondered in what creative ways he would chose to inflict punishment now that he had so many variations of it on his hands.

"What do you want Malcolm? Really, this time."

His smile got wider and for some reason, it made him look even more serpentine to Felicity.

"Right to the point, as ever. One of your most charming traits."

Felicity gritted her teeth, tried to keep her composure as if this was just another QC board meeting and she had to present another trimester project for the Applied Sciences Division. But she slumped a little, in a way that she had grown out of years ago, but that would remind him of the impatient teenager she used to be - dressed in black from head to toe, with a smart mouth and an attitude problem that had an attitude problem.

Because if he wanted to play games, so could she. Felicity didn't think she could ever be as good as Malcolm was at them, but she had spent too many years at Moira Queen's side not to have learned a thing or two about manipulation. The fact that there was never much love lost between her and Moira didn't change that.

"I suppose you have already realized that there is a reason you're here."

 _No shit, Sherlock_.

Felicity looked at him a long time. He was waiting for her to ask him what that reason was. Waiting for her to ask the questions, give him the chance to explain her things.

Subtle games of control.

 _Fuck you._

She'd already asked the only question she needed him to answer.

"You're the one responsible for unmasking Robert and the rest of us," she said instead, the pieces falling into place almost as if the curtain had been lifted. Suddenly she could see it all. "A big risk, considering all the times we were almost killed in the last five days. I know you reached to Moira to offer to keep us 'safe' and it was all to bring me here, so _what_ do you _want_?"

"It's always been funny to me how you despised me for my arrogance without once realizing you are exactly the same." Malcolm laughed. " _Worse_ even! I know perfectly well I'm an arrogant man. You, my dear stepdaughter, are far blinder."

 _Pompous little shit_.

He only called her that because he knew all too well how much she hated it. Felicity didn't give him the satisfaction of reacting to it. She raised one eyebrow instead.

"You assume that just because I know I'm smarter than most people, I would also assume to be right about most things too."

He raised his eyebrows. "And you don't?"

"Oh, I do. But I trust statistics and laws of probability more than I trust opinion, even when it's mine." Felicity said simply.

Thea and John were both excellent fighters, but Malcolm had plenty here that were even better. It could be because of Diggle's connection to Argus. Felicity had considered it. But it hadn't been Lyla he had dangled in front of them earlier than night, like a chunk of meat in the water.

The thought still burned somewhere between her fourth and fifth rib, relentless. Felicity pushed that anger down.

 _Calm. Calm and steady_.

No this was about her, and the only thing she had to offer that was in such rare supply was her technical skills. Malcolm knew them well.

She wasn't about to explain her reasoning to him though. It would be a waste of time and she didn't feel like sharing an single ounce of herself with him.

"You think I put on all that circus and risked getting my long time friend killed just to get you here? I could have snatched you out of your home any time I wanted."

"I'm honestly surprised that you didn't," she said, as if the notion barely affected her. Personally, Felicity couldn't fathom a reason why he hadn't.

Malcolm tilted his head to the side, linking his fingers together. "I find kidnappings… distasteful."

She barely kept herself from snorting.

 _Bullshit_!

There might things he found distasteful, but taking hold of someone's person and agency like that was not one of them. Malcolm _lived_ for that kind of shit. But he was also familiar with her stubbornness. She wasn't naïve enough to think that that would have stopped Malcolm from hurting her to get what she wanted. Nor was she so convinced of her own endurance to fancy herself unbreakable. Working for Robert the past year had taught her a lot about the persuasive power of pain and fear. But Malcolm knew her well enough to know that he couldn't hurt her and then to put her in front of a computer without grave consequences to his person. Punishing her, when she had been a teen in his care with a mother who traveled too much for her job, had only led to raging retaliation and bitter resentment. He knew Felicity well enough that she was exactly the kind of petty to sign her own death if it also meant his.

Which meant that he needed her full compliance beyond any doubt for whatever he had planned. And what better way to ensure it than this? He had half her family under his roof right now.

The more Felicity thought about this, the more she became convinced that, though the plan had been by far too complicated, the theme throughout it mirrored who Malcolm was perfectly. Whenever he wanted something but needed someone else to do it for him, he made it so that the goal was shared. Either mutual benefit, or – preferably – mutual destruction. He had found the perfect way to make sure she worked for what he wanted as if she wanted it as hard herself.

There were only three reason why Felicity would do anything at all for Malcolm.

Well… four, actually. Four _people_. Two of them were waiting for her in a shared room. The third was halfway across the world, loved by a woman who was a literal force of nature and who would keep him safe from anything. Even from Malcolm.

And the fourth… she'd thought he had died years ago but apparently, not. He was god knew where inside this labyrinth of a fortress, and didn't seem to be any more alive now that he had been to her days ago. It didn't really matter who was wearing Oliver's face though.

Malcolm had probably known that too.

"It is unprecedented you know, having guests like you and your friends in this mountain. But I allowed it, for the sake of the long time friendship I share with Robert, and my fondness for you and Thea both… no matter how unappreciated. After all, I did once call you daughter."

Felicity couldn't hide her disgust. "I thank god I was never your daughter every time you cross my mind, Malcolm."

He laughed. "Yes, I imagine you do."

She hated the way his eyes glinted as they fixed on her face. Hated the mocking tilt of that smile that had taught her to mistrust everyone who ever smiled her way.

"I've always liked you Felicity. You have spirit. I prefer obedience, but you can be quite amusing."

 _Amusing…_

Felicity took a deep breath. Waited him out. She had lived through years of him putting Tommy down and mocking him. She knew him too well to rise to such an obvious bait… through she did imagine clawing his eyes out as she looked at him.

"There is this one nuisance that I need to take care of, and for which I need your unmatched skills. I think that small service is a fair exchange for your safety here." Malcolm finally said. His smile stretched wider, knowing eyes fixed on hers, glinting in the firelight. "And for that _other_ thing you're now about to ask me."

Felicity gritted her teeth.

She never stood a chance, did she?

"I want you to let Oliver go. _Forever_."

Malcolm huffed, and for the first time the amusement on his face was real. "What makes you think I'm keeping him here against his will?"

She pretended she didn't even hear him. ( _she couldn't afford to give into fear, that little whisper at the back of her head that told her there was nothing there left to save. His eyes had been so empty she hardly recognized them on his face_ …)

"Neither you nor anyone related in any way shape of form to you or this place will ever contact him again. And if you don't, or if I get the sense that you're going to double cross us, while I hack into whatever it is you want me to hack, I'll send a nice little message to Amanda Waller with the exact coordinates of this hellhole." Felicity tilted her head and smiled. She couldn't hide the way her hands were shaking, or how emotion made her eyes shine but she would see this through. "You know the Wall's preferred method of dealing with a nuisance, don't you Malcolm?"

She would blow this whole mountain sky high because the Wall didn't give a fuck about anything other than neat solutions.

"There is no need for threats here, Felicity." He smiled as if the notion alone amused him, but his eyes were cold. "As I said, I'm perfectly willing to give you what you want, if you do the same."

"No, what you're willing to do is let me know that you can hurt me if you want to, because you know how." She wasn't going to let anything be lost in translation here. "But you misunderstand Malcolm: that was no threat. That was me reminding you that I know how to hurt you too."

"I doubt it."

She hated him so much she would have gladly slit his throat right there. "You shouldn't. I learned from the best."


	3. Chapter 3

_Everything you needed to know I told you without speaking. I watched you the way someone who has never known fire watches the grey dawn ignite. I touched you the way a wild animal walks into a thresher. I held your name in my mouth the way the river holds the moon."_

 _— NATALIE WEE, ( 12 / ? )_

It had been the middle of the day when the Gambit left the Starling City harbor. Felicity had barely made it there in time, but he remembered the relief he'd felt when he'd seen.

She was been wearing a flirty red blouse, the ends of it tucked into her white pencil skirt. Always with the bold choices. She may have dropped the goth look, but she was still just as noticeable. She'd stopped dyeing her hair black a few years back. Now it fell in shiny waves around her face and shoulders, their brown shade almost as warm as her smile. Oliver caught of her bright yellow purse and matching heels and his smile became even wider.

He stepped away from his parents, arms already open, ready to catch her when she'd jumped into them. She did, held him close and tight as if she hadn't seen him in ages, when she'd only been gone to Metropolis for two days.

"You made it."

The relief in his voice had made her chest ache. But instead of saying anything, she chuckled, there against the side of his neck where she'd pressed her face, and then a bright pink kiss too.

"I made it." She pulled back to look at him then, a hand still against his face, the side of his neck. "Couldn't very well miss your first international business trip, could I? How does it feel to be the first representative of ' _Firestorm_ ' overseas?"

His smile faltered a bit. Her hand traveled down his arm, fingers tightening around his bicep. A sure gesture of comfort.

"You're gonna do fine. You know every in and out of our company better than anyone and people love you the moment they meet you, because you understand them." Her hand slipped down his chest, soothing patterns over his heart. "You'll do great, Oliver."

He shuffled his feet, looked down. He was smiling in that particular way that reminded her he liked knowing he was valued, but it didn't quite touch his eyes this time.

"That's not really what I'm worried about."

Felicity winced. "I know. You'll do fine with _that_ too."

He raised one eyebrow at her, a humorless smile curling his lips.

"Just try not to kill each other." Felicity deadpanned.

"Right. We have rules about that." He said around a chuckle. And they did. ' _No murders unless she was around to help him hide the bodies._ ' As far as stupidity deterrents went, it had worked quite well during their teenage years. Even more so later on.

* * *

"Also, only a finite number of suspects on a ship." Felicity added, lips pursing up in a moue. The kind of expression Oliver hadn't been able to look at without wanting to kiss her for it in a long time. They'd been married for a less than a year ( _ten months, two weeks and a day, but who was counting_ ) - neither was even really used to the idea yet – and been together for three before that, but they'd been friends for much longer. Almost half their lives had been lived around the other, which was why it was so hard for Oliver to really know when he'd started falling in love. Sometimes he thought there hadn't even been any falling involved. No tipping point that he had jumped from, out of which he could pinpoint a single moment. It hadn't been like that for him. Love for Felicity had snuck up on him, and it had taken him a long while to realize it.

But this also meant that Felicity knew him well too, and she knew in that moment just from the tension bunched along his shoulders and the guarded look in his eyes despite the jokes, Oliver was actually worried.

Felicity knew better than most that Oliver and Robert had never gotten along. They clashed on fundamental levels of their personalities and Oliver had only recently made his peace with the fact that those gabs would never be closed; only acknowledged and respected. Robert too had seemed to get this and stopped trying to pressure his son into becoming someone he never would be.

Personally, Felicity thought Moira had had something to do with that, seeing that the last time that Robert had tried to bring Oliver into the family business, their argument had evolved into a fight, which had ended with Oliver moving out and not speaking to either of his parents for almost a year. Robert might have been stubborn enough to let it go on for longer – that trait he and his son definitely shared – but Moira would never have stood for it. Not for anyone's sake.

Sometimes Felicity wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall when their discussions took place. And then she'd remember she had been in that position a couple of times, and then she'd immediately regret her curiosity.

The fact that there were only so many places two people could avoid each other on a ship didn't really look good on their chances of getting along either, but Robert had insisted on taking the Gambit. Felicity still didn't know how to feel about that. She considered herself optimistic by nature and choice, but forgiving people who hurt her had been trained out of her early. And she held an even harder line for those who hurt people she loved. So no, she wasn't inclined to give Robert Queen a second chance; not even _half_ of one. But Oliver was different.

He'd been armoring his kindness with brashness and coolness for years, but for someone who knew him the way Felicity did, his nature was transparent: above anything else, what Oliver wanted was to be loved. From the moment she had understood this, she'd grown this inexplicable need to step up as a shield in front of him. It had been predictable to her, the way Oliver had reacted to his father's request: with both suspicion, and hope.

If she'd loved him any less, she might have even pointed out its futility, but she hadn't. She may have never had a gentle heart, but even so, she hadn't had the will to snuff that hope out.

It wasn't all bad, though. They had each other and Oliver had Thea, who looked at her brother like he was her hero- Nothing could ever taint that. Thea got on with Felicity like a house on fire, with Tommy adding in the gasoline, Laurel pinching the bridge of her nose as she watched and Sara laughing about it all from the sidelines, throwing in the occasional piece of wood. Despite everything, even Robert and Moira had showed a kind of fond tolerance for Felicity, since she'd been around since she was thirteen.

That is, until four years ago, when a 21 year old and fresh-out-of-MIT Felicity persuaded Tommy and Oliver into founding 'Firestorm'. The Queens had cooled towards her considerably then, but they were all civil, for civility's sake. Felicity didn't really care about their approval and Oliver… well, Oliver seemed to had gotten himself to a point where not having it didn't hurt him quite as much anymore. One of the truths she kept close to her chest was that some days, all the efforts building Firestorm's reputation as a cutting-edge cyber-security and software development company had been worth it, if only for the smile on Oliver's face when she and Tommy had suggested their project to him.[A.A2]

Felicity pulled on the lapel of his light jacket just a bit to get his attention.

"You can always bail and just _fly_ to China, you know."

She'd actually prefer it, for his peace of mind. But she knew even before he looked up with a small smile, that he wouldn't. He'd never been one to give up in front of a challenge. And hope… hope had always been too bright in him, no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

That was precious. Felicity loved him for it. More than anything, she didn't want him hurt because of it, by someone callous enough to see it as a weakness.

A whispering thought brushed by her, dark and unforgiving, that she would make Robert regret the day he was born if because of him, Oliver got back to her in any less perfect of a condition than he was before he left. She _might_ have hinted at that once, very calmly, a few days ago before her trip to Metropolis. She'd been amused by the way Robert's eyes had fixed on her in open surprise. But she'd been a bit shaken by the little smile on the corner of Moira's lips.

Those two were weird.

Oliver linked his hands at the small of her back, his eyes softer as he looked her over.

"When I get back, we could circle back to that discussion we started last night."

She felt her heart flutter.

"I don't think the City docs as you're leaving is the best place to talk about acquiring real-estate, Oliver."

His smile turned a little crooked.

"As good a places as any." But his teasing subsided fairly quickly, serious blue eyes setting on her face. "What's the matter? Really, this time. I don't want to leave without knowing."

Felicity shifted on her feet a little bit, but then decided she might as well get it all out now. It's not like any of this was going to change in three weeks he would be away.

"You know that if we start talking actually about _buying_ a place, there will be a lot of things to consider. Stuff like 'where', and how… how many rooms."

She let that sentence hang between them. Saw understanding as it settled on his face, felt it in the way he pulled her just a little bit closer.

"You know I wasn't trying to hint at that, right?"

"I know." she hurried, not even wanting to leave a single breath for hesitation. "I just…"

Felicity bit her lip, looked away. She wasn't ready to be a parent, not by far. There were so many things she wanted to do before that. She wanted her life in some kind of order if she ever had a kid. She wanted to raise that hypothetical kid herself and differently from how she had been raised. She wanted her would-be-kid to have a family, but as it was right now, that kid's would be parents sometimes barely even made time to be with each other.

There was no place for a child in their lives right now and she knew that Oliver knew that. They'd talked about it and agreed on it… but at the same time it felt a little bit like she was denying him something. They were five years apart. Maybe he'd gotten to that point where he wanted kids faster than she had. It wouldn't be so strange. Not the first time they had moved at different paces with something. Not the first time they'd found a way to fall back into step with each other again either.

When Felicity tried to explain her thoughts in so many words, Oliver just shook his head. There was something sad in his smile, something that tugged between her ribs and made her want to rush the words out, all her feelings, even as he brushed her hair over her shoulder and slid his hand down her arm.

"I'm not ready to be a parent either. I still don't know if I ever will be."

Felicity let out a careful breath, her words weaved in it. "Me either." The thought alone made her feel queasy. "…If we ever want to be better than our own parents, we're gonna have to work for it."

She could see the impact of the words on him. Neither of them had voiced that fear they both shared quite so bluntly before. But it was still true.

Oliver nodded. "And stop being afraid we'll become them." He admitted.

Felicity's arms slipped around his waist, hands settling on the small of his back, drawing little patterns up and down his spine. It always made him lean into her. Even on top of her heels she had to tilt her head back to see him. He'd pulled her closer then, his head so low that their foreheads had brushed together. And if they swayed in place just a little bit, neither of them cared.

"We've got this. Right?"

Oliver smiled. "Right." he said with a decided nod. "And we have time to figure it out. This is just the beginning, remember?"

It was hard to forget really. The other things besides kids that she'd never thought she'd do before she fell in love with the dope with whom she was saying to no music with, was marriage. But there she was.

And Felicity knew that Oliver had tried to make her smile with those words, but she couldn't. Her heart felt too heavy with feeling.

"Yeah?" Her voice was shaky, honest. It made him want to wrap himself around her.

They both had such frail insides, really, but he'd never in his life trusted anyone more than she trusted her to be tender with his. And it was a privilege to be able to be trusted with hers too, like this. Open and without pretense. This was what it meant to be someone's safe place.

Oliver nodded once. "Yeah."

She smiled. Shook her head as if to lighten herself from the overwhelming emotion of the moment. Get back to herself again.

"By the way – you still haven't told me where we're going for our anniversary." She said, poking him on the side, trying to sound lighter.

"No I haven't. It's a surprise."

His cheeky smile wouldn't save him ( _though the spark in his eyes might_ ). "I don't like surprises."

"You'll love this one."

The sheer happiness of his smile might have been reassuring but that cheeky wink really wasn't.

From the distance, they both heard Robert calling him. This was the part Felicity hated the most. She'd never known how to say goodbye, or how to take one without making it feel like an open wound.

"I love you."

When her only response was a shaking breath against his lips, Oliver smiled. He knew Felicity well enough to know that she would never say it back if it was meant to be 'goodbye'. She didn't even like saying it back when it meant 'I'll see you later.'

His smile stretched a bit wider. "And you love me too, don't you?"

She nodded before the words even were fully out of his mouth.

"Yeah. Yes, I do." And a helpless chuckle after, both happy and embarrassed for herself and the strange quirks that dictated her words, her actions. He understood them though. He loved those too.

One of her hands sneaked up to the back of his neck then, just as she tilted her face up for him, waiting for a kiss that did not delay a moment. She might not say it back sometimes, but Oliver had always known she loved him: by the way she'd touch him, the way she'd kiss him. With every bit of passion she had in her, and tenderness too, making everything feel as soft and warm as the sun against his face. She surrounding him with moments of deep privacy, suspend him in them. A love and connection more real than anything. He learned the meaning of intimate over and over again when she'd kiss him. Kisses that felt as if she had been meant to give them, and he had been born for.

He'd never doubted her in love, because everything he needed to hear, she'd told him without speaking. All her wordless language had come thorough to him more clearly than anyone who had ever spoken to him before. He'd never felt unsure of this, because every time she'd touched him, he'd felt like he belonged.


	4. Chapter 4

_I was the most elegant_  
 _loneliness, the most exquisite_  
 _creature among all of the_  
 _unloved._

 _Caitlyn Siehl, Quite Death_

Before she left him, Malcolm gave Felicity 'permission' see him. _Permission_ …

Felicity didn't know where to find Oliver though, so despite the fact that she couldn't possibly give the tiniest fuck about Merlyn's permission, she did need some kind of help with direction so in the end, whether she liked it or not, she had to fold to Malcolm's 'escort': a woman about Felicity's own height, with an expressionless face and wide, velvety dark eyes. Felicity wasn't going anywhere without taking Thea with her though, or the younger Queen would throw a fit. But when Felicity got back to her room, Thea was still asleep. Digg hadn't left her side.

He tried to though, when Felicity explained where she was going.

"Digg…"

"I'm coming with you, Felicity. It's as simple as that."

She sighed. "He won't hurt me."

Digg's face was a study in unimpressed, but beneath that there was very real anger.

"He stood by while his sister was drugged and you were knocked unconscious," he stepped a bit closer, his eyes became kinder, his voice softer. "Whoever that was, it's not the man you married anymore, Felicity."

She looked away.

She had never been able to stand people looking at her like she was something wounded. Ironic that he would look at her that way now, when he never had before.

"That's not why he won't hurt me. Merlyn needs me alive, so that's how he'll keep me." She grimaced. "He was nice enough to point that out before I left."

John took a moment to think about that. When he spoke again, he sounded almost severe.

"What did he tell you?"

Felicity nodded. "He told me why we're here."

"We already knew that."

"Not really, though." Guilt stung hard, then. "He wanted… _me_ here, one way or another. So here we are."

"Are you telling me that _Malcolm Merlyn_ is the reason…" Digg's eyes widened. "Why would he go through all that trouble? That doesn't make a lick of sense!"

Felicity took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She felt the sting of tears, but held it back.

"It does when you know who Malcolm is. He loves framing people into doing things they hate doing. He gets off on it."

"And what does he want from you?"

When Felicity didn't answer immediately, Digg gently took her by the shoulders, so that she could look him in the eyes again. She did.

"You haven't promised him anything, have you Felicity?"

She didn't answer that either. His fingers tightened, his worry so obvious it transcended words and just for a moment, as he understood the situation. Then he let go.

He looked almost as scared as he was angry.

"I thought you knew better than to make deals with the Devil." He said as he stated pacing.

"He wasn't exactly asking Digg. And I want something in return. This is the only way to get it."

"For god's sake, Felicity! You don't even know if there is anything in Oliver left to save anymore."

Felicity raised her chin minutely. It was enough to remind Diggle that she was one of the most stubborn people he had ever met.

"Does that matter John?" She asked, the softness of her voice so unlike the hard look in her eyes. "If it were Lyla - or Andy… would that make any kind of difference?"

It was hit below the belt to bring his brother into this, and they both knew it, but Felicity's eyes on him were unflinching. John stopped pacing, and released a long breath. His shoulders slumped in defeat.

"No, I guess it wouldn't."

x

The wooden doors in front of which Malcolm's sentinel directed her to looked utterly unremarkable. Felicity had memorized the route she'd taken from Thea's room to get in front of them. She had counted every step and turn and no that she was here she knew she could find this door again without anyone leading her to it.

Much good may it do her.

Felicity stood in front of that door longer than it would be thought rational But her thoughts wouldn't start making sense no matter how long she stood there, so she just raised her fist and knocked.

There was such silence on the other side and for so long, that Felicity started to think this had been for nothing. She hadn't even figured out if she was relieved of disappointed – when, without the smallest sound to prepare her for it, the door was pulled open… and there he was.

She almost took a step backwards. Still couldn't quite believe it.

He looked taller, from this close. Like he inexplicably took more room than he should. Larger than life.

( _Bigger than death too, apparently_.)

Had she forgotten him? Forgotten the lines of his face and that was the reason why he seemed like such a different man.

Or was it simpler? Was it that he'd just changed?

His eyes glanced over her as if she were a stranger; spoke in Arabic to the woman behind her instead. ( _He_ sounded _different too. His voice rougher, like he hadn't used it in so long_ …) His words flew directly over Felicity's head. The woman's response made his lips pres together even harder, a muscle jumping right there at the corner of his jaw the way it used to when he was annoyed.

Her heart was beating at the tips of her fingers. For a moment she thought of leaving, but she knew she wouldn't.

She couldn't.

Felicity barely felt her 'escort' leave. She had eyes only for his eyes, and when they moved from somewhere above her left shoulder to her own, she almost took a step back from the weight of that stare. From how unreal it felt, still. It was so strange to have him look at her like she was just anyone at his door. She didn't feel like he was just anyone.

But then again she wasn't feeling much of anything, really. She felt like she was made of water and would just left right into the floor and through the cracks of the stones that paved it. More than anything she wanted to reach out and see if her fingers would just go through him or not.

He spoke to _her_ in that foreign language too. It sounded lovely, but Felicity had no idea what he'd just said.

"I don't speak Arabic." She didn't recognize her own voice, hardly felt her lips moving.

He said nothing in return, just stood there without blinking and without expression. But he didn't close the door on her face either.

Felicity squared her shoulders.

"May I come in?"

It was impossible to know what he was thinking. His face was a blank slate and the light from the torches on the wall had a way of obscuring the dips of someone's face, sharpening the angles and deepening the shadows. He stood so straight though, so tense.

Oliver only used to be this tense when he was extremely uncomfortable, or threatened.

Felicity took stock of herself, all 5.5 feet and 117 pounds of herself, and measured it against him. What kind of threat could she be to him?

In the end he didn't say anything. Just took a small step backwards to let her through the door and once she was inside his room, he closed the heavy wooden thing behind her without a sound.

His room looked wide, but maybe it felt that way because there was so little in it, or because the light from the few lit candles left more than one corner swathed in darkness. A bed – unmade, the sheets on top of it such a mess that Felicity's heart jumped and she had to closed her eyes and take a steadying breath. A desk, two chairs, some candles and a rug. To call it spartan would have been an overstatement.

He walked away from her, grabbed one of the wooden chairs and pulled it out. He stood there, then, tall and pale even by candlelight and _alive_ , as if he was waiting for her to take a seat. Felicity didn't know what to do. She had no idea. Her mind had been carpet-bombed, it stood silent.

Or buzzing as a beehive, every thought too far for her to reach and make sense of. Too far.

Like him.

So real, though. Senseless; deathless. But real.

It seemed that she stood by the door forever, not knowing how to swim through this moment without drowning. And drowning felt very real in that moment – the water was already at her chin. Felicity had to tilt her head back for every precious breath. She stared at him openly and he looked back, expression blank as a clean sheet of paper. But then …she saw him shuffle on his feet, caught sight of the way he rubbed his fingers and his thumbs together, before curling his hands into tight fists.

Felicity shook her head and looked up, blinking fast. This was not the time for tears.

She cleared her throat, licked her dry lips. It didn't help.

"Oliver?"

He didn't react to his own name now anymore than he had reacted when Thea had yelled it. She was barely… he kept staring at her and it was like looking at a ghost.

She didn't know much about the League. They were good at hiding and they were good at killing – that was the extent of her information. But Felicity looked at Oliver's broad shoulders, the faint outline of a scar curling behind his ear; took in the dark circles under his eyes like bruises, his bloodless lips… She had combed the fringes of ARGUS long enough know what terror looked like when it was done onto another person. And what it took to build people capable of those things the League did.

That made her afraid. Afraid for him.

And angry enough to really want to raze this mountain to the ground after all, once she was done.

And yet, for all her violence, she felt as frail as a dry leaf: on touch and she'd crumble. His name was, again, the first word to make it out of her mouth. Another link in the chain that was the litany in her head.

"Oliver… It's Felicity, remember?" in the silence that followed her words, Felicity took a step forward. "Oliver…"

Not a blink from him. Nothing. It was impossible that the only she knew would act this way. She didn't want to give Malcolm any credence, but his ' _some pieces of him might have… faded_ ' was starting to look like more and more probable.

"How did you end up here? Do you remember that? What about Thea, do you remember her? Tommy, Moira. Your father?" He stood there and she didn't know what to say anymore. "That's a no, huh?"

 _What happened to you…_

He wouldn't answer that either.

Her vision got blurry and then cleared again. She felt the sting of her tears when the salt of them bet the scraps on her left cheek. That whole side of her face throbbed but she felt so detached from it. She felt removed from her own self.

Maybe that was why the words after that came easier.

 _Let's play pretend…_

"My name is Felicity Smoak. We…" what? What would follow that? "We we friends, once. The girl you saw earlier is Thea Queen. …Your sister."

No reaction at all. Nothing.

Fine. _Fine_ , she could deal with this. She could there were no memories between them. _About_ them.

Memories. Another name for ghosts and their awful hunger[1].

"It doesn't matter." She said then, dismissive ( _lies always left a bitter taste in her mouth_ ). Which part didn't matter was unclear even to her. "I… we all thought you were dead, but you're not. And now we're here."

Though what was starting to freak he rout was the unblinking was he looked at her and how his face was so unfamiliar, even though it was his. But it was easier to talk to him that way.

"What happened before this moment doesn't matter. Neither you nor I can change it. God, I wish I could…" her voice shook, but Felicity pressed her teeth together and took a deep breath to calm down. "The thing is, a long time ago I promised that that I'd look out for you, so that's what I'm here to do."

She might as well be talking to herself. But it was easier to be frustrated – to actually find a thread of emotion that made sense and hold on to it. "I'm here to do a job. As payment for that job, Merlyn will set you free from… from this place."

He raised his chin, eyes trained on her like a hawk – incapable of blinking. "Ra's al Ghul."

Felicity shook, a breath coming out of her unsteadily as if she'd been punched.

"What?"

"Ra's al Ghul is his name."

She balled her hands into fists. They were shaking. _She_ was shaking. _Anger_. Straight from the gut, scything its way out. At him, herself, _Merlyn_ and whoever the fuck came before him. She'd been accumulating anger and shoving it under the rug for the sake of survival since this whole things started. No more.

And anger helped. Felicity always solidified and focused when she was scared, when she was angry. When she was _pushed_. Her bones felt a little less like liquid now, with anger there to thread them into solidity.

"You're correcting my terminology? Really?"

The light was so dim in there. The candlelight barely touched half his café, the other half was deep in the shadows. She couldn't tell if he was frowning or if she as just imagining it.

"You cannot call Ra's by any other name."

"I don't give a fuck what his name is."

"You should." It sounded like a warning. "There are punishments in place for that kind of insolence."

Air evacuated her lungs to the point where she thought for a moment they would implode. But then she breathed again.

" _'Insolence'_." Felicity had never thought that would be a world Oliver would use. It sounded too much like something Malcolm might say. The thought made her teeth grind together. "Are you the one who's gonna act those _punishments_ out?"

His lip twitched and he rolled his right shoulder.

What was it? Irritation? Discomfort? …A meaningless tick getting lost into translation once it passed through the lens of her wishful thinking.

"It is not my duty to enforce League procedure."

It chilled her how… untouched he seemed by the whole idea of it, when she felt shiver after shiver shaking her bones loose.

"Yeah? What is your duty."

"That is for the ears of Ra's al Ghul only."

"Fuck Ra's al Ghul." There wasn't even any heat behind it. His eyes narrowed one her as if he meant to pin her in place with them.

"Careful." He warned, low and threatening.

Fear was Felicity's reaction though. It stroked the coals of her seething anger. ( _her hope. Hope was a glutinous animal – every reaction from him fed it_ )

"Fuck being careful too."

Felicity took one step towards him and for the first time he reacted to her: he took a step back. She pursed her lips against the whimper that threatened to get out.

"Why should I anyway?" she knew that hope could gnaw with sharp teeth. It was why she had buried it. But it's bite now was vicious enough to forget fear and walk closer. "Why should I care? Why do _you_ care?"

" _Don't_ come any closer."

Felicity froze. It wasn't because he told her to – it was the spark of panic in his voice.

"Why not?" she couldn't breathe past the leash around her throat. A whisper was all she could manage. " _Oliver_ …"

He shook his head minutely. His eyes gleamed in the semidarkness. "Oliver Queen is dead."

 _Fuck you!_

The thought was so explosive in her head that she could barely contain it without screaming.

"Oliver Queen is standing right in front of me, you asshole."

"My name…"

"Do you _know who I am_?" A challenge now. She was talking too fast, trying to keep up with her thoughts shattering apart into new patterns.

"If you know who Oliver Queen is well enough to know he's dead then you must know who I am, right?" Felicity took another step towards him. If she reached out, she could touch him. She didn't try though. " _Right_?"

"Wrong."

"You're lying." She hissed through gritted teeth.

"You talk too much." He seemed almost surprised at it.

It could almost have been a laugh, that sound that escaped her, but it was too thick with tears for the name to fit.

"Yeah, we established that years ago." There was a lot she wanted to say, but only one thing mattered. "…I'm going to get you out of here, Oliver. I promise."

"That is not my name."

"I don't care." and she didn't. "I'll get you out. _You_! Whatever name you go by, these days."

"There is no out. There is no escape, and nothing holding me here but my own duty."

"Your duty is to me!" Felicity didn't mean to shout. She really didn't. she didn't mean to get all in his face either, hadn't thought she would have. She just… found herself standing there, seeing at him. "Your duty is to yourself."

"I have no self anymore, Felicity Smoak. It is a shadow and a thought that you're holding on to. You won't find what you want in me."

Felicity stepped back, dropped her face in her hands – than winced when she pressed against the tender and bruising side of her face.

She didn't understand what he was trying to do at all. In the end though, it was like she'd said to Digg before: it didn't matter.

"Nevertheless, I'm still going to get you out." She repeated, out loud this time. That was what mattered. "That was the deal I made. Your freedom was the price. What you do with it is your choice. Stay here. Or leave. Whatever you want."

He gave her a look that was almost exasperation. Almost familiar…

"You don't understand."

"So _tell_ me. I'm smart, I'll get it." That was all she needed – that imperceptible softening of his voice that went straight to her heart without mercy, so familiar that she forgot and reached out.

Oliver flinched away, eyes wide as if she'd hurt him. Felicity stepped back almost as fast, just as startled.

"I'm sorry." The words were out before she'd even thought about it.

The look on his face…

She saw him mouth the word ' _sorry_ ' between pale lips, like he hadn't heard it in so long it no longer had any meaning to him. But when he looked at her again, his face was as void as the first moment he saw her.

"You are here because Ra's al Ghul wants you to be. I am here, because I was ordered to be. There is nothing beyond this." For the first time he stepped toward her and not the other way around, and Felicity froze. She thought she saw such sadness in his eyes ( _eyes she knew so well and never thought she'd see again_ ) but she didn't feel like she could trust her eyes with him.

When he spoke again his voice was low, she had to staring to hear.

"Before he was Ra's, he was a Trickster. Magician. The recompense is not worth your toil, because that recompense does not exist."

Not worth it? What was he saying? Was this a riddle? Felicity frowned hard, thought it over.

"I think I'd rather judge that for myself, thank you." She finally said between gritted teeth. Still, dread was making a pit out of her stomach. "Ordered?"

"Yes."

"To do what."

"Speak with you."

She shook her head. _Unbelievable_. "Why?"

"I am your incentive."

He sounded so fucking detached… the sob that wanted to rise out of her soul choke in her throat. It was survival – every time she'd been in such pain that she'd thought she'd die of it, she'd survived by being stubborn.

"Doesn't you telling me that defeat the purpose?" Felicity tried for even, but couldn't quite keep the anger out of her voice.

"Ra's thinks not."

Felicity groaned her frustration out and started pacing. She wanted to roll into herself and cover all her soft places, but there was no covering from this. All she could do was own it, not.

"Well, _good_ for him. I don't care." And she threw her hands out for good measure. "I don't give a shit!"

Oliver followed her progression with his eyes and a frown. "You are not very sensible."

"Never have been." She didn't even hesitate. Those kinds of answers used to make him smile, once. "Maybe you really don't remember me after all."

It wasn't because of a missing smile that that thought went past her lips. It was a sudden and insurmountable desolation she felt, that opened up the floor beneath her, shoving all her exhaustion on top of her at once. She was so tired of bleeding by her fingers, trying to hold on.

"I remember you mattered, once, to a man that is no more."

Felicity turned to him so fast she almost got whiplash "I don't believe you." She whispered it, as if it was a secret.

"And that is what you don't understand: you are far removed from the world you know. What you believe doesn't matter, here. What you want doesn't matter."

"What about what _you_ want?" Felicity knew that she was on the verge of desperation, but she'd felt like she was walking blind into a labyrinth from the very first moment she saw him. She'd lost the thread – desperation now was appropriate. "Does _that_ matter?"

Oliver seemed to straighten even further. "I am a member of the League. There is no wanting for those of my kind."

Felicity shook her head, set her jaw stubbornly, ready to fight him over this all night, but it didn't deter him.

"For your good, and the good of those you love, I advise you do as Ra's commands. And then leave in peace, if you wish to keep peace."

"First of all, it wasn't a command: we made a bargain." Though that was her own ego talking. "And secondly, methinks you're confusing peace with quiet there[2], and frankly, I've never been good at either."

And she was just wasting her time here anyway. Felicity turned and went for the door. "Thea is going to want to see you when she wakes up. Try not to tell her that her brother is dead, she's been through enough. And she might also just punch you in the face."

"Be careful, Felicity Smoak."

She scoffed. "Well, you always said you were 74% of my impulse control, so if you wanna nitpick, I haven't been careful in more than 5 years. One might even say that careless life-choices brought me here, so one could argue based on probability alone that that is not likely to change. How do I open this thing?"

She'd been staring at the complicated locks trying to figure out how to open them – failing. He walked to her and started opening them. Felicity didn't move. It was the closest he had voluntarily come to her. When she looked up, his face was close enough that she could see every groove carved there by god knew what kind of pain, and fresh tears stung her eyes.

She was so tired of crying.

Felicity didn't notice the open door. she noticed that Oliver looked up and kept staring at her face, maybe waiting for her to cross the threshold and get out. Noticed his eyes on hers, and then roaming, her hair, her cheeks, the scratches on her neck and the swollen side of her face, the cracked lip. His eyes seemed like dark glass from so close.

So close…

He didn't seem a stranger then. He seemed Oliver.

No it didn't matter what he said, what his warnings meant or even if they had been warnings and not her overreaching hope warping simple words. It didn't even matter if what he side was true and it wasn't worth it. He was alive and he was in trouble. Frankly, Felicity should have been more unsettled that that was enough to make her start planning fires to light on an unsuspecting world - but it did not.

She would never leave him in this alone. Not for hell or high water… or even under threat of becoming both. It should have stayed her hand, but it did not. She'd do whatever she had to do. That had always been her way.

[1] Eugene Gloria, from "Apple," My Favorite Warlord

[2][2] Avengers, Age of Ultron


	5. Chapter 5

" _Home is within. Within me are mountains._

 _\- Aimee Brown_

She was twelve when her mother and Malcolm Merlyn started circling each other. Malcolm wanted to expand the advertisement of Merlyn Global, her mother was the biggest Casino and hotel presence on the West coast… It had seemed harmless. Or as harmless as her mother's business ventures with attractive men ever were. She was twelve and a couple of months, when they decided to date, as well as work together. Thirteen when they got married.

In all honestly, Felicity hadn't been surprised with the dating thing. She'd surrendered to her mother adding Merlyn to her collection, so she had decided to patiently sit it out, the way she had sat out all Donna's previous relationships. Non-engagement was the safest distance, especially since none of them seemed to last anyway.

Tommy Merlyn on the other hand – because this one came with a kid in tow, unlike the others (it should have worried her, but she'd had no frame for it) - had seemed (and had been) utterly despicable. Not that her mother had cared, since she was always pushing her at him, wanting them to be friendly, as if the best that could happen to them was being the kids of people who wanted to copulate.

(She'd been so desperate, her mother, to give her a family. Felicity hadn't realized. She'd thought her mother thoughtless and only known solitude, while Donna thought herself not enough, and tried to give her daughter people who could be better. Both looking for each other and searching in the wrong places.)

Felicity hadn't really been open to the friends-and-getting-to-know-each-other idea of her mother's grand plan. She'd thought it a waste of time and effort, since she'd thought her mother's new flame wouldn't last enough for Felicity to care. But also… she knew she didn't deal well with scrutiny in any kind of situation, and that being around strangers made her even more manic than usual – which meant that her mouth ran away from her faster than normal. Now, normally she didn't really care. She'd never thought there was something actually wrong with the way she talked… So maybe she slipped up a bit. Talked too much sometimes. It wasn't like she could help it – god knew she'd tried to be different - and even her mom said it was endearing. But being a twelve year old freshman in a Vegas highly exclusive prep school, had taught her a lot about the ways 17 year old boys and girls could make her life difficult. So no, she did not want to put herself in front of a bunch of stuck-up Starling kids that had old money stamped on their foreheads like a landmark.

And she didn't like the way they looked at her mother either. Not Tommy and not his best friend with the stupid hair and not the tall too-pretty-to-look-at-for-long brunette that was sometimes with them.

Which was why she did all she could to avoid Tommy Merlyn at first, but still, she had had to be in the same room with him for extended periods of time at least twice in the months her mother and his father dated. Both times he had been surrounded by his friends and had ignored her soundly, when he wasn't talking to her through that self-satisfied stupid smirk of his. All of his friends were older and they all looked about as neat and put together as everyone in her prep school always looked and they made Felicity feel self-conscious of her glasses and braces, her round baby fat still clinging to her everywhere, every time she sensed them looking in her direction.

She knew, logically, that not every time they laughed, they were laughing about her or at her… but it did not feel that way.

God, how she'd hated them.

She hated all of them even harder – her mother, Malcolm, his son, his son's smug entitled friends – when Donna uprooted their whole lives to move closer to one she wanted to have. Felicity never even got a say in it.

She'd been so surprised. Shocked, actually. She never expected marriage to ever come into it and had been as floored by it as Tommy had looked. Their parents had set them down together to tell them the happy news. And they had both looked like they had been slapped in the face.

Finally, something she and Pretty Boy had in common.

But where Tommy Merlyn limited himself to standing and shaking hands with his father stiffly, and forcing a smile for her mother when she embraced him instead, Felicity had fumed.

She had gotten up and stalked out, not answering to her mother calling her voice. She'd kept walking till she was out of the house and then walked further, until she couldn't see her apartment complex, until she didn't know the name of the street she was in.

She had felt so angry. And ridiculously betrayed.

Donna had always liked men and Felicity had always known it; she had had her fair share of them and honestly, Felicity never cared. But she'd never changed anything for them. But for this one they were changing coasts, schools, lives, wardrobes, and Felicity wanted to scream at it all. And she did.

She rejected her mother's soothing words and Malcolm's fake smiles. She refused to be smoothed over by even the hurt in Donna's eyes. Her mother hadn't cared about her, so she wouldn't care about her mother either. Fair was fair. She scowled at Tommy and bit back hard every time he tried to talk to her, to get back at him for all the times he'd looked at her like she was the funniest joke in the world. She couldn't be happy with anything so she settled on making everyone else miserable too. So she wore black to the wedding, frowned in every single picture and generally was the most unhappy brat ever.

She knew Tommy called her 'the nightmare'. She didn't really care (or so she said, though inexplicably it made her even more unhappy, the 'he started it' in her head no consolation). He brought it on himself, and so did everyone else. If she was going to be the luggage her mother towed around, then she owed her niceness to nobody. Luggage was heavy, not 'nice' or 'smiling' or accommodating.

… she did meet Thea early on though, and as hard as Felicity tried, she couldn't really be mean to her, because she was just too damn adorable. She was the happiest kid in the room ever damn time and she was about the only thing that made Oliver Queen tolerable.

They met at the wedding-that-never-should-have-been. She just bounded up to Felicity in all her seven year old glory and smiled, not caring about the doom and gloom little cloud that hovered over Felicity's head.

"Hi! I'm Thea Queen, nice to meet ya!" and she'd extended her little hand at her all the way.

Felicity had hesitated a moment before taking it. She hated people who were assholes to kids and wasn't about to become one.

"Felicity Smoak."

Thea hopped on one of the many empty chairs surrounding Felicity, her skinny legs swinging back and forth without being able to touch the ground.

"So you're gonna be Tommy's new sister, right?"

Felicity filched. "No."

"Right! Stepsister." She nodded to herself, utterly convinced.

"I'm not gonna be Tommy Merlyn's anything."

"Why not? Having a brother is nice. Ollie is a dweeb but he's the coolest too."

Felicity bit her lip not to snort. Ollie Queen was the patented arrogant rich kid who knew he had a pretty smile, but that her just her opinion.

"I… don't thinks it's gonna be the same?" she tried instead.

"Why not?"

That seemed to be Thea Queen's favorite question. Felicity floundered.

"Well for one, Merlyn hates me."

Thea snorted out a laugh. "No he doesn't! He told you were really smart. Like, super genius kind of smart."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Are you?"

Felicity blinked. "Umm… well I thing quantifying intelligence is a fundamentally flawed idea and the tests used to do it are arbitrary, so I don't think…" Felicity trialed off as Thea's eyebrows started rising. And then she sighed and nodded. "Yeah, I'm a basically genius."

"Really?"

"Got a MENSA card and everything."

"That's so cool!"

Felicity blinked, surprised and a little afraid to smile. "It is?"

"It totally is! Are you really a freshman? Are you going to be going to go at the same school as Ollie and Tommy?"

She didn't seem to stop to breathe and Felicity thought she finally might have met someone who spoke as fast as she did.

"I… I think so…"

"Awesome!" She jumped to her feet. "You wanna come and mess around with the banquet's seating charts and hide everyone's left glove?"

Felicity couldn't help the laughter at that. "Why?"

Thea shrugged. "I dunno. 'Cause it's fun?"

Sounded like as good a reason as any. And that was more or less how she made her first friend in Starling.

The too-pretty-to-stare-at-for-too-long brunette was Laurel, and she turned out to be really… nice? Like, a genuinely nice, enjoyable person, who helped Felicity get around on first day and show her where all her classrooms were and introduced her to a few of her friends. And maybe her friends weren't as nice as Laurel but Felicity supposed there was only so much any high-school girl could pay attention to the advanced studies thirteen year old weirdo in their classes.

She could have graduated at fifteen, if she wanted. And she'd wanted. But her mother her been completely against it. They fought about it for ages. It had been strange to have Malcolm on her side that time, but it didn't really make her warm up to him any.

And nor did the way he talked to Tommy, actually.

Ok so, she had no great love for Tommy Merlyn, sue her. The house they shared was so big and he was gone so often that she could pretend that they didn't actually share a life. But Malcolm was a real asshole to him and Felicity knew that she wasn't the only one who noticed.

Maybe that was why Tommy was gone so often… (she would not feel sorry for him, ok! She wouldn't!)

Either way, instead of an early graduation though, what Felicity got was a birthday party she never asked for.

A birthday she learned of when a smiling Oliver Queen slinked over in the hallway outside her advanced mathematics class and wished her happy birthday.

"I wanted to graduate, mother, I did not want a birthday party!" she yelled when her mother insisted for the third time she didn't understand what the problem was.

"Felicity, honey, we talked about this. Fifteen is too young to go to college. The party has nothing to do with it. The party was supposed to be a surprise for you."

"I hate surprises. And you know it."

Did she forget everything about her own kid overnight?

"Well, I was kinda hoping you would warm up to this one. I got you such a nice dress too."

Felicity bit her lip not to scream. She didn't give a shit about the dress. Or any of it!

"I am not going! You can have your party, I'm not going to be there."

Donna sighed and for a moment Felicity was sorry because her mother looked so tired.

"It's your birthday, baby. We always celebrate your birthday…" She said, sounding almost pleading.

They did. They celebrated at 1.24 am because that's when she had been born, and the party was always just the two of them – because her father didn't get to have any of her nicer memories now – and a glass of milk and chocolate cake.

Not like this…

And besides-

"You didn't even ask me." And it kinda hurt her feelings, actually. "Or tell me?"

Since when was that her mom's style?

Donna fidgeted, walked around her desk to get closer to her daughter but Felicity stiffened, so Donna folder her hands in front of her instead.

"Malcolm thought it would be a nice surprise for you. Help you make friends at the new school."

She looked so hopeful and it made Felicity so, so angry. She clenched her jaw so hard her teeth hurt. She was shaking.

"Oh, he did, didn't he…"

Donna looked away. "We thought it would be nice. Something better than our usual-"

We…

"I like our usual way of celebrating my brith just fine, thank you." Felicity snapped, scowling fiercely. "I guess it wasn't good enough for Malcolm Merlyn."

"It's not like that, baby…"

"Yeah whatever." She snorted. "Make friends. I don't even know these people."

The thought of actually spending time with people who didn't want to be there and who would resent her for coming almost brought her to tears.

"Well this is the perfect opportunity to get to know them!"

"They hate me, mother!"

Donna sighed and sat down heavily on the sofa closest to her.

"Are you having trouble at school?" this time her tone was the no-bullshit one Felicity recognized. She sat down on the sofa opposite to her and fiddled with the hem of her sleeve.

"No. People are… fine. Most of them anyway."

"Is people being 'fine' the reason you want to graduate sooner?"

"Ugh, no. I want to graduate because I can. And because I want to go to MIT."

Donna smiled, shook her head. "MIT is not going anywhere, baby."

"I don't like wasting time."

"Don't I know it." Donna said around a smile. Felicity may be her father's spitting imagine but there were some things that were pure Donna - and Donna took quite a lot of pride in each and every one of the little pieces of herself that were reflected in her daughter.

"How's it going with Tommy?"

Felicity flopped backwards on the sofa. "Oh god mother. Why do you always ask me that?"

"I want you two to be friends! He's a sweet boy, and I am convinced that if you give him a chance, you would really like him."

Sweet boy? Where did her other come up with stuff like that, it was as if they didn't know the same person.

"Sometimes I think he's the loneliest kid in the world." Donna said, eyes staring off in the distance. She turned a soft smile to her daughter then. "He could really use a friend like you."

Felicity groaned. She hated the guilt card, damn it.

"Why am I the one that has to make an effort anyway? Sexist much!"

"Felicity…"

"What, it's the truth. He's done nothing but ignore me, and his friends are gross and they laugh at me, so excuse me if it don't want to hang around with him."

"Ok fine. Fine. Just… just try for me ok. Try."

Felicity wanted to curl up into herself and maybe sleep for a week. But then all the carefulness of her mother came to her and how she always seemed to look so tired lately and how she smiled less and less… and Felicity felt guilty. She'd been so angry and unhappy… but she didn't really want her mother to be unhappy.

And if all it took was to try, well… trying never hurt anyone.

Felicity walked around and pushed the bodice of the dress down, but then she felt like her barely-there boobs were falling out so she pushed it up again. She had been uncomfortable enough to fly out of her skin all night, so she saw this sneaking around as something that was worth it really. It was why she was putting so much thought in being careful about it. So she walked through the room full of guests on the tip of her toes and making sure not to look anyone in the eye.

She felt bad for leaving Thea behind like this but they agreed that if a successful escape was to be completed, then they had to go out in separate ways.

'Trust me' the Queen had said. 'I've done this loads of times.'

She ducked inside one of the side rooms of the first floor, which was mercifully empty, and opened the window without making a sound. Pulled her long dress up, stepped over the window-sill and carefully put one leg over the edge and then another, turning carefully.

The window was just barely up from the ground, and she could almost toe the grass as she slid down.

"Hands up!"

Fear went up her body the way a drench in cold water would slide down. She shook and squealed and it made her lose her balance. She would have fallen hard on her side and expected to, but she was caught just in time between one laughter and another.

"Hey, easy there, kid."

She knew that voice. It made her die inside a little… and hasten to get both feet on the ground and right herself.

He laughed when she pulled herself together and brushed off her skirt, checking for tears in the fabric. Her mother would kill her if she ruined this one too.

"Oh, I hate you." She hissed, pushing at him as hard as she could. Oliver Queen just laughed some more.

"So where are you sneaking off to, birthday girl?"

She looked at him. He looked ruffled and there was the smudge of lipstick at the side of his collar, and he had a sweating beer bottle on his left hand.

"Sneaking." Felicity answered, short and angry and embarrassed. Her heart was still beating fast because of the scare he gave her.

Queen just shrugged.

"Don't blame you. You'd never believe it was a fourteen year olds birthday in there."

"Might as well be a wake." Felicity mumbled looking around, convinced her mother would jump out of the bushes at any moment and make her say hello to her school friends again, while Malcolm presented her to his business partners again.

Queen snorted.

"Cute glasses by the way. I like the double color thing, it suits you." Felicity narrowed her eyes at him and Queen immediately raised his hands, palms out to her, holding his beer bottle between his thumb and index finger. "Hey now, I mean that."

Felicity shuffled on her feet, suddenly feeling put on the spot.

"Thanks, I guess."

She looked inside through the window and behind her, feeling so guilty for sneaking of that she expected to get busted at any moment.

"You can relax you know. It'll be at least 15 minutes before they start looking for you."

She eyed him suspiciously. "You're not gonna tell on me, are you?"

His smile softened a little, and even though he rolled his eyes, it didn't seem as flippant as usual. "No, I'm not gonna tell."

Felicity didn't believe him, but it wasn't like she could do anything about it.

"Hey Ollie, did you get… oh."

Felicity groaned. Great. This just kept getting better.

She turned to face him. "Hey Merlyn."

"Hey yourself, Smoak." Tommy looked her over. "Your mom was looking for you."

Felicity groaned. "Outstanding."

"I told her you needed a second in the bathroom to freshen up." He said then, with a shrug.

Like Donna Smoak was gonna buy that.

"I'm fourteen. I'm as fresh as it gets." She snarked, and then bit her lip. It wasn't like he said anything bad… it was just hard sometimes to get out of one gear of a relationship and put in the next.

"I'll tell her you wanted to take a walk around the garden with Thea, ok?" he tried, and it sounded almost like a real question.

"Thanks."

Tommy nodded. And then gave her small smile. "I'm sorry about the party, Smoak. I would have saved you earlier from the pain of shaking hands with every old dude in the room but my dad got to me first."

Felicity only blinked at him for long moments. She wrapped her hand around herself . "I… It wasn't so bad, I guess."

Tommy quirked his eyebrows at her and she gave in.

"Yeah ok, I should have stayed in my room and read 'The Bell Jar', same effect. But… the bright side is that they all seem to be emotionally stunted and they think it's ok to hand out money instead of actual thoughtful gifts and, you know… talk to me like I'm a person in the room."

"Don't take that personally. That whole 'Kids are meant to be seen not heard'…"

"Or hear anything." Queen added.

"Yeah, that's kind of a thing most of these people have got going on."

Felicity felt her eyebrows reach for her hairline.

"That's… messed up. But positive for me, I guess, since I accumulated a small fortune and I'm gonna get me that brand new Linux OS really soon."

Queen laughed, leaning against the wall and taking a sip of his beer, but Tommy just smiled at her. It was the first smile from him that didn't feel like a mockery.

"You could have asked your mom – or hell, even my dad. He's been talking about your big brain all night to everyone with ears, like your brain is his accomplishment or something. They'd get you whatever you wanted."

Felicity just shook her head. "I buy my own stuff."

He stared at her for a moment then smiled.

"Cool. Go ahead, I'll cover for you." He said as he started walking backwards up the trail that led into the pool-house.

"Thanks."

She turned around and started walking through away from the house.

"Hey Smoak!"

She turned in time to see Tommy walking towards her. He passed her a bag of chips, and started taking off his suit jacket.

"Those are Thea's favorites. And this," he said as the wrapped his jacket around her arms. "Is for you. It gets chilly at there at night. Don't worry about Thea, she probably took a blanket. The kid is experienced."

Felicity was left standing there, speechless. The longer she was silent, the more amused Tommy seemed by it.

"Wow, you're actually speechless, I didn't know that was possible."

And sure, any other time she might have scowled but this time she couldn't.

"I… don't know what to say?"

"'Thank you' usually works."

"Thank you." The words couldn't come out of her mouth fast enough. This moment felt so…weird. But also bigger than the actual moment and she really didn't know what to do, and she felt like shit for having bickered with him day in day out now.

"I'm sorry I was mean to you." She whispered them, toeing with the soft grass at her feet.

"Nah, it's ok."

"It is?"

She really didn't think so, and the way she looked at him showed it. And that seemed to surprise him, too.

"Yeah, I mean - I wasn't a ray of sunshine either. You're just a kid, I shouldn't have let it get to me. Besides, you're sorry, right?"

Felicity nodded. She wasn't really sure what she was doing here, or if she should trust him. But she didn't have a real reason not to either, so…

"Yeah, I am too. Have a good night, Felicity."

He walked backwards for a while and then ran to catch up to Queen who was waiting for him further up the path.

"Hey, Smoak!" Queen yelled and then winced when she glared at him. "Happy birthday."

His whisper-shout seemed funny and she actually stared after them till they joined their own sub-party. And then she turned on her heel and ran down the path and straight to the docks where another Queen would be waiting for her. She was late and Thea would kill her for sure. For an eight year old, the smaller Queen was quite the fury.

She'd never know what changed that night. Whether her mother had spoken to Tommy or if Thea had said something to her brother. And the most beautiful thing was that it never mattered.


	6. Chapter 6

Her first time over at the Queen's was very… informal. Thea dragged her over. And then most times it was Tommy asking her to tag along when he went, so that she wouldn't have to stay in the house with Malcolm when her mother was away. Which was not always smart, since there was something about Moira Queen and that blank stare of hers, that never failed to make Felicity nervous. And nervous Felicity ended up doing weird shit like hanging in the doorways like she was afraid to step inside and commenting on the furniture that looked the stupidest.

"Those are really cool candlesticks. Six inches apart?"

And it was so freaky the way the woman didn't even blink. She'd just smile and invite them into the living room.

The first time Tommy had asked her why she was so weary around Oliver's mom, he'd laughed himself silly at her answer. But it didn't make her change her mind: she didn't trust people whose hair didn't move, on principle. Tommy of course had just kept laughing, the little shit. And he didn't try that hard to mask his laughter at her when they were at the Queen's either – and neither did Oliver. Whichever of them sat closest to her eventually learned to watch out for her insanely sharp elbows jabbing them to the side.

It never stopped Thea from inviting her over though. Or Tommy from taking her along when he went over – which was most of the time.

It seemed funny to Felicity sometimes, how someone who she had thought was so careless, watched over her like a hawk when his own father was around. It took her a while to understand that maybe he tried so hard to protect her, because he wished someone had protected him. He didn't seem to understand, her stepbrother, that she didn't need as much protecting. She could see through Malcolm, more often than not and his little blame-games went right over her head. It was Tommy who needed protecting.

The ironic thing was that Malcolm actually liked her.

Well no, that was actually a very freaky thing. She did not want to be the kind of person a man like Malcolm Merlyn would like.

She'd asked Tommy about it one night, when they'd sneaked out into the tree house that he and Oliver had build when they were kids. He was going to leave for his second year of college the next day and he'd stayed the night in, to spend it with her. It had been sweet. And it had made her sad.

"Does it bother you, ever?"

"What?"

Felicity hadn't known how to say it, so she'd just said it. "That he seems to like me more than you."

Tommy had stilled. He hadn't needed explanation.

"It did before. But not anymore." He pushed his shoulder against her gently. "Can't really blame anyone for liking you better than me, Smoak. Seems a natural progression."

"It's not what I mean though." She'd murmured.

"I know it's not. Does it bother you?" worry was written all over his face, and his eyes were serious this time. He was serious so very rarely. He liked taking things lightly, Tommy. Not making a big deal of anything because Malcolm made a big deal of everything.

"It kinda does actually." Felicity admitted, looking at her chipped bright green nail polish.

There were a lot of things about Malcolm that had always put Felicity on edge. The way he smiled when he spoke; the way he never raised his voice, until he did. The way he paced in front of her when she was sitting; the way he looked at Tommy, at her , at her mother. The way he kissed Donna when she was upset. The way he waved away things that matter. How he made it a point to be super nice to her just after he'd been a passive aggressive asshole to Tommy.

No she didn't like him. In fact she really resented him and she thought he was a cold bastard who liked telling people what to do and getting his way.

But he was her mother's husband, for some reason. And Tommy's dad. And though she would have advocated loudly for a divorce before… she kinda… didn't want to now? Maybe?

Malcolm wasn't around that much anyway and she liked Tommy a lot now.

He was a lot nicer, once he decided to be nice. He had a thing about people, Tommy: he understood them. Which was weird for Felicity, because she'd never met anyone, aside from her dad – and wow did he ever disappoint - who understood her. But Tommy did. And it was so weird really, but he unreservedly seemed to… like her? It took a while for that to sort of, sink in. Like, she could go on and on talking and he sort of just - smiled? And it hadn't taken him even three months to learn all her favorite comfort foods. He always was down for re-watching her favorite shows, and Felicity on the other hand learned to love foreign movies. He had weird a thing for French films. And a whole separate thing for Disney Classics too, so they had lots of fun nights in with that. She always waited for him in the morning so that he wouldn't have to have breakfast alone – he skipped eating if he had to eat alone. He had a knack for knowing exactly when to talk to her and when to leave her be, which made her trust him. And the very best part: he was amazing at distracting her mother.

Her favorite thing ever was when they would go out in these long drives that ended up at the other side of the city, and they'd have ice-cream sitting on a bench somewhere, or on the hood of his car.

Sometimes Oliver joined them too – which Felicity had been weary of, at first. Oliver was pretty okay when he wasn't three beers into the conversation, but Felicity sometimes got the feeling he wasn't a big fan of having to share Tommy with anyone. (Which was a total asshole thing to think ok! Tommy was his own person, not Oliver Queen's personal comfort friend! …But she never said that though, cause that would have been a pretty asshole thing to say too.) He had this way of looking at her sometimes, that wasn't always… it wasn't hostile, not really, but it wasn't friendly either. It made her feel like he was watching out for her to make a mistake or something.

But to her surprise, Oliver just sort of sat quietly in the back seat and listened to her and Tommy talk. He laughed sometimes, really softly, like they surprised it out of him.

He was weird, basically. (Tommy seemed to think he was sad mostly, and that his weirdness was because he had stupid ways of coping with his sadness. Felicity maintained that there was no excuse for being a dick, but she never said that aloud either.) But Felicity had yet to meet someone who wasn't, so she didn't really think it was the end of the world.

But the problem with liking Tommy a lot and him worming her way into being kind of her best friend, was that Tommy was leaving again, and without him around, it was a lot more lonely. She could only spend so much time at the Queen's before they noticed the Merlyn/Smoak kids used their home as an escape place.

"How soon can you graduate?" Tommy asked, so out of the blue that Felicity startled.

"In a year, at most. I'm planning on enrolling to MIT by the time I'm 16."

He turned a big smile on her, surprised and delighted. "You were accepted?"

"Yeah."

"Whoa Smoak, why didn't you tell me?" and though his smile didn't falter at all, she could tell that he was a lil but hurt.

"I didn't tell anybody. Mom is still going on about me being too young."

He sobered up at that. "Yeah well she's not wrong. College is fun, but take it from someone who knows the fucked up parts, it can be dangerous."

"I'm not gonna go out partying every night, Tommy."

He rolled his eyes at her. "Still."

Felicity groaned. "Come on, not you too. I need someone on my corner that is not Malcolm. Every time he agrees with me I feel dirty."

She shuddered theatrically and that finally got a laugh out of him.

"He still suggesting on putting a security detail on you?"

"Ugh, yes. He's such a shameless control freak." And an insane one if he thought he would ever get her to accept that kind of thing.

Tommy clapped his hands, hard then, making such a loud noise that she flinched.

"The hell?"

"We need to celebrate." he said getting to his feet and extending a hand for her to take. She did and he pulled he rup.

"You've finally decided to become a sheep herder, grow a beard and move t the mountains?"

"Close." He took her by the shoulders and his smile lit up the room. "You got accepted to one of the best universities in the world, Smoak. This is big."

"Mint chip chocolate kinda big?"

Tommy barked out a laugh. "You're so easy to please." Which made Felicity poke him in the ribs. "Ok, so you're easy to please when it comes to food. But food is important."

"Food is life, Merlyn."

"That's the spirit."

He called Oliver the moment they climbed down, told him to bring Thea along to, as per Felicity's request. They drove out to pick both of them up in the convertible, because it was the car Felicity liked best. She gave up the shotgun seat to Thea when they got there though, because she always smiled the brightest when she sat there and that mattered too.

Tommy took the longer way through the woods. It was after midnight at that point and the hills seemed deserted so when Thea asked Tommy to go faster, he did, just a little bit. ('Put your seatbelt on, Speedy.'

'Don't be a grump, Ollie'

'You too Felicity.'

'Chill with the bro-mode Merlyn, I always put my seatbelt on.') And the faster he went, the louder Thea squealed. She threw her arms up and laughed loud enough to upset the birds in the trees.

Felicity closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the headrest, with the wind picking up her curls and pulling at her clothes. When she tilted her head to the side and opened her eyes, she was very surprised to find Oliver looking at her with the smallest smile to have ever been smiled. She was actually not even sure she saw it, it was gone so fast.

They drove out to the jetty at the other side of the city, and walked all the way to the water. Sat down and had their ice-creams there, with Thea leaning against Oliver's shoulder and Felicity sitting between him and Tommy.

"It's really pretty out here."

"Starling growing on you, Smoak?" Oliver asked.

Felicity just shrugged. "It's okay, I guess." She answered without looking at him, staring at the blinking lights of the city curling around the harbor instead.

"Don't get too comfortable – Boston is nothing like Starling."

"I'll can handle it."

He huffed. "I'm sure you can."

Felicity turned a small frown at him, not sure if he was honest of mocking, but he was staring ahead at the city too and his face was blank but for the little curl of his lips jut there at the corner.

"MIT and Harvard are really close though." Felicity said turning to Tommy. "It's like, a fifteen minute walk."

"Did you Google that?"

She rolled her eyes at him. "I've been wanting to go to that place for years, Merlyn. I know Boston's map by heart."

Thea laughed. "Wow, overkill."

"What, I like being prepared." Felicity defended.

Her brother was amused too, but for different reasons. "Are you getting attached, Smoak?"

"Shut your face, Queen."

"Sure, sure.


	7. Chapter 7

Felicity looked up. "He reads three papers?"

"Yup."

She closed Rousseau's letter collection with a snap – first edition, of course - and looked over at him, confusion scrunching up her face.

"How come I didn't know that?"

"No reason for you to know it?"

"Hey, I notice things."

He moved around the huge desk to stand side by side with her, in front of the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books he'd never really glanced twice.

"I don't think you've ever had breakfast with my dad during the weekdays."

She gasped softly, tried to elbow him in the ribs. Old move.

"I've been over tons of times. And I a way earlier rises than you."

He raised one eyebrow at her.

"What? I may not like it, but I do get up!"

"Yes, I know. In fact, I seem to remember this time when you and Thea tried waking me up by shooting electrical current up my toe."

"Oh my god that was one time, get over it!"

Oliver snorted. "Says the girl who still holds a grudge against pigeons in general because one pooped on you one time."

She looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "It was my favorite coat! And excuse you, I got pooped on! Not the same thing. I have the right to bear a grudge."

"It's good luck in some counties."

"Not on this country." Her pout is as adorable as it was when she was 13. Reminds him of Thea a little bit, but without Thea's usually scorching temper to follow. "I loved that coat."

It had been maybe six months since he'd seen her last since he'd spent the summer travelling up and down the coast and she'd spent it taking summer courses at MIT, the overachieving freak, but she didn't look that different. Her hair was longer, the curls a bit more tamed around her face. She still had the same glasses.

The bright pink lipstick was new, though. Donna must have been thrilled.

"Malcolm reads three papers too." She said absently, running her index finger along the backs of the books as she read the titles. "Maybe more. I don't know."

"Now that is something you should know, since you 'notice things'."

"Malcolm doesn't count. I usually step out of the room when he comes in."

Yeah, he'd noticed that.

"Why?"

She shrugged. "Code I live by. Keeps me healthy. Reading three papers all probably reporting the same thing when you could easily get the info online, is a terrific use of trees, by the way."

"Well, I like to be well-informed."

Felicity barely held back a yelp and turned around with a big smile on her face.

"Mister Queen! Hello!"

She excluded both awkwardness and charm in some strange, Smoak way that Oliver had never found on anyone else but her. It was kinda hard not to find it endearing, usually. His father's smile brightened just as Oliver's slipped off his face. Oliver knew that despite him not showing it, his father liked Felicity a lot better than he liked most people. Better than he liked her mother, for instance.

She wouldn't even look at him, if she knew that.

"The prodigal daughter returns."

Felicity took his offered hand with ease but the smile on her face was embarrassed. "Thank you for inviting us over."

"You're very welcome. I admit it was for selfish purposes thought. I wanted to hear all about MIT. Was it everything you expected?"

Felicity shuffled on her feet a little. "I think so, yeah. I mean, I've only experienced one term so far, but still…"

"Is it as hard as you expected."

Felicity smiled. "Harder, actually. But I like it."

His father nodded. "Good. Determination is what will get you through the hardest spots in life."

Oliver barely held back from flinching.

Goddamn it. Why the fuck had he not left out the back door yet?

"Well then she should do just fine, since she's as stubborn as a 12 year old mule."

Both Oliver and Felicity turned to the door at the same time but it was Felicity whose face lit up.

"Tommy!" she practically ran to him in her haste to tackle-hug him.

Right. This was why he hadn't bailed.

Tommy laughed.

"Smoak, you just saw me like, two hours ago. Was it or was it not you who picked me up from the airport and actually managed to knock up both down?"

"Shut up."

He liked to pretend, Tommy, but Oliver knew that he loved everything about Felicity and Donna's open way of showing affection. And though Donna seemed more… reserved now, maybe, than she had been in the beginning, she was still the most sincere grown woman of their social circle Oliver met in a long time.

Well, apart from her daughter that is.

What the fuck she was doing with Malcolm god only knew.

He walked over and once Felicity had let Tommy go, he leaned in to hug his best friend. "Shame I wasn't there to see that."

"Your own fault for not joining the Smoak ladies in picking me up."

"Oh, don't worry. Our very graceful descent has been immortalized by the security cameras. I should be able to get to it no problem."

Oliver laughed. "I don't think you can pay off airport security to share their recordings with you, Smoak."

She blinked the way she did when she was surprised, then covered it up with a shake of her head that was a bit too nervous.

"Right. Hah, of course not. I knew that."

Oliver narrowed his eyes at her as Tommy and Robert shook hands and exchanged the needed 'welcome home' part of it all. Felicity though was very stubbornly not looking at him.

She was lying about something, which was cute, in a way, because she was such a bad liar and always got nervous. But he never got the chance to needle it out of her, because a moment later they were being ushered out of the library and towards the drawing room.

"So how was England anyway?"

Tommy sighed. "Cold, wet. Glad to leave it."

Oliver knew exactly what the heaviness in Tommy's voice was, and by the wistful look in Felicity's face, so did she. It was strange sometimes how much she noticed for a 16 year old kid. She was right, she did notice things.

"Well, your semester at Oxford is done and Boston is just as pretty in the spring." She shivered. "Way too cold for humans, but I have discovered the immense joy of thermal underwear."

"A motto to live by." His father said, his voice shaking with suppressed laughter and Felicity winced.

"Right." she said, biting her lip, cheeks starting to pink.

Tommy was about to say something but a very loud squeal interrupted him. Thea had just walked in through the door and the moment she saw Tommy she dropped her bag where it may land and dove for him.

It was a good thing that Thea was still tiny cause her 'wrecking ball' hugs put Felicity's to shame.

"Neither one of you is allowed to leave ever again." She said as she gave Tommy the tightest hug he'd probably ever gotten. Only someone who knew her well would know she was not joking, not even a little bit.

Felicity leaned a bit closer to him. "Just so you know – it looked kinda like that."

"I figured."

o

His father sat on one end of the table, his mother on the other. The meal was excellent – vegetable-based, mostly, since Donna had chose to change diets some months ago and for some reason his mother knew about it - and the table perfectly set. It was as dinner always was at the Queen table… but there was also a Tommy and two Smoaks sitting with them, so Oliver was kinda looking forward to it.

A parting from reality if there ever was one.

Oliver didn't know when it had been that their presence had taken on a comforting meaning in his head.

It must have been sometimes between Malcolm and Donna's second year of marriage and Oliver and Tommy getting arrested that one time for trying to break into a locked down mall while high as kites. Malcolm had to pick them up from the station because neither Robert nor Moira were in the country – which was also why Oliver had to stay over at Tommy's that night, 'under adult supervision' by order of the court until the trial.

Dinner had been unbearable, with Donna straining to act as a mediator between Tommy and Malcolm's cutting, seemingly offhand, remarks. It had made Oliver's skin crawl and it had made Felicity stare at them all like they had lost their minds. Until she'd just… blurted, out of the blue and utterly randomly,-

"I hate Nietzsche."

Both Tommy and Oliver had looked at her wide-eyed. Donna's look though held a degree of warning into it.

"Felicity…"

"What? I do. I hate him. He was an up-his-own ass chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister, wore the pelt of a dead animal for facial hair – imagining him eating something is super gross by the way - and had a face too small for his head."

"That is one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, young lady." Malcolm had said, cold and calm.

"Yeah, the Nazis thought so too."

"A face too small for his head?" Oliver remembers repeating. But Tommy had given him a warning glance and Oliver had shut up.

And stayed in the sidelines all night as Felicity kept insulting a philosopher who had died more than a century ago and in the process, irritating Malcolm to distraction, to the point where he seemed to forget all about Tommy and the fact that was sitting there at the same table.

Which Oliver had understood a bit later, had been exactly the point.

He'd started warming up to her after that. Started thinking maybe it wasn't so bad having this second kid around, after all. Though she really was too smart for her own good most of the time.

"Actually, if you think about it, all these thinkpieces about how Millenials are 'killing' various industries reveal a pretty colossal sense of entitlement of your generation, not ours." Felicity said as she carefully cut up her vegetables, and Oliver snapped out of the memory lane, returning to this dinner who wasn't nearly as suffocating.

"Under normal circumstances, if a given industry finds itself unable to sell products to a given market demographic, we'd say it's that industry's fault for failing to offer products that that demographic is interested in buying, wouldn't we?"

His father considered that carefully. "Yes we would."

"So it only makes sense to blame the target demographic itself, if we're assuming that the established industries have some intrinsic right to that demographics' disposable income that's being denied to them - which is clearly nonsense.[1]"

His father was frowning, but for once, not arguing. "Well, I don't think it's that simple."

"I disagree, it is that simple. Everything else is dressing."

His mother chuckled. "Well, I see that your time in a university environment setting hasn't made you less sure of your opinions."

Oliver looked over at his mother. "Was it supposed to?"

"It's better, I think, not to be too firmly planted in a single point of view. That way you are more free to change it without seeming fickle."

"I've never seen changing one's mind as a sign of fickleness." Donna said pensively, tuning to his mother with a genuine smile. "Or anything negative really. It means you are able of amplifying your opinions. Implies flexibility of thought."

"Besides, I'm not even seventeen yet. I'm supposed to be fickle and change my mind and grow up. Why is there such a stigma around that?"

Oliver met her eyes and smiled. "You're supposed to be born grown up."

Thea giggled. "Like Miss Trunchbull?"

Felicity and Donna seemed as amused as his parents were lost.

"It's a character in a kid's movie." Tommy explained.

"The world moves forward and there is progress in that," his father continued as if he hadn't heard them. "But you can't deny that some of the practices of your generation are as useless as they are harmful."

"I bet you're talking about social media right now."

Robert nodded, missing Felicity's irony.

"I doubt I'd see the philosophers of ancient Greece waiting their time on the internet."

Oliver winced, but Felicity snorted – and then remembered that was bad manners and composed herself.

"Oh please, if they were alive today they the vast majority of them would be shitposting memelords. That sort of thing was totally in their idiom. Especially the Cynics; a bunch of wankers who thought they were saving civilization from itself through ironic performance art would have killed to have a forum like modern social media."

Moira was looking at Felicity the way she'd looked at Oliver and Tommy when they'd broken her Ming Dynasty vase when they were twelve.

Donna however was very much in her daughter's line of thought.

"They were aristocrats who took themselves too seriously and insisted on 'abstaining from pleasures' and 'consistency' and 'reason', so I hardly think so, baby. The Cynics and Stoics, maybe, but they were humorless grouches too."

"Sure, if you take their writings at face value, but based on third-party accounts of what they actually got up to, a lot of that 'abstaining from pleasure' and 'pure reason' stuff was very much a 'do as I say, not as I do' proposition. Plus, the greater part of them seem to have regarded elaborately trolling each other as a virtuous pursuit![2]"

When nobody answered her, she looked around the table. "What, I took Ancient Greek Philosophy as an extra subject this semester."

"As an extra credit subject?" Tommy asked, slowly, as if he'd misunderstood.

"Yeah."

"Because it's such fun studying ancient Greece! Are you insane?" Though Oliver couldn't finish the sentence without laughing because Felicity Smoak was definitely the most freakish overachiever he had ever met and the funny thing was, she had literally no other default.

"Jury's still out on that one."

"Felicity!" but Donna's objection was mostly a laughing one.

"It was ok but mostly it bored me."

Oliver sniggered. "Well we can agree on that at least."

"I guess Plato is a lot more boring without a hundred selfies and a facebook account." Donna said with a smile.

Felicity turned to her mother. "What, you don't think he would have, if he could?"

"I actually find the practice of taking infinite pictures of oneself to be a specific expression of your generation's narcissism." His father said.

"Right." Oliver interjected. "In the old days, people used to pay artists to paint them surrounded by their possessions."

Robert gave him a one of his looks, but Felicity's grin immediate.

"Or the even older days, you'd be buried with them." she added around her smile. "Your possessions I mean. And occasionally your numerous wives too, depending on the region. Much more subtle self-love."

Robert looked between the two of them and sighed. "Sarcasm. Another pillar of your generation."

Oliver looked at him, wishing he could pound the words 'stop' into the side of his father's face, but he knew it was useless. Felicity though just tilted her head, as if to consider it.

"What's so wrong with sarcasm?"

"You never say what you mean. And you always think it's the other person's fault that they don't understand what you mean."

"Well, you can't always say what you mean. Like, you can't really tell some people you think they're a huge douchebag, cause apparently that's bad manners even when it's true? Instead you say 'Wow, nice jacket'"

Oliver choked on his salad and hastily sipped on some water while Tommy passed him a napkin. He tried to pass off his laughter as coughing, which wasn't getting him really good points with his mother.

Donna was giving Felicity a reproachful look too, but Felicity seemed to pretend not to notice, and Oliver thought back to every occasion he'd heard Felicity randomly tell Malcolm, 'nice jacket', when she'd been fuming at him just a moment prior.

 _Jesus_ …

"You do see how that doesn't really solve the problem though, don't you, Felicity?" his father continued. "Nor cant it, if people don't speak openly to each other."

Oliver found it immensely ironic that his father was the one giving talks about honesty and openness, seeing that Oliver had kind of lost count of the times women his father had cheated his mother with, but that was the joy being of Robert Queen. He saw no contradictions within himself.

"Well, it's kinda hard to say what you mean when you know you won't be taken seriously." Felicity immediately rebutted. "It's not really the nicest thing in the world when everything you say and do gets greeted by a whole discourse of why that is 'wrong'." She used the quote unquote signs as if it was a normal thing to do on the Queen dinner table. "And needs to be rectified. So excuse us for not being fans of that."

"Sometimes one party needs to speak and the other to listen." His father insisted. "That's what communication and dialogue is."

According to Robert Queen, that is.

Felicity pursed her lips, and if he were anyone else, Oliver might have thought she was flaking her way through this conversation, but he could see in her eyes that she was dead serious.

"Umm… when that is all that happens though, and the roles never reverse, I believe it's called d a lecture. That doesn't encourage communication. It requires obedience."

"And that seems such a bad thing to you, Miss Smoak?" His father asked with a smile.

Her mother smiled at her. "You're not turning into an anarchist, are you baby?"

"Not necessarily. I just like independence better. Obedience 'just cause' sets bad precedents. Makes people believe they're right, when in truth they're just stronger. It's not the same thing."

"Yeah, we usually call that bullying." Tommy added.

And there was a moment – a moment when Tommy's and Felicity's eyes met across the table – during which they were in perfect understanding and everyone else on that table was left out of it. Everyone else but Donna, who looked away from them and to her own place with a frown, hand gripping her fork and knife so hard that her knuckles had paled a little bit.

But maybe that was just because she looked a bit skinnier lately than she used to.

"We're getting off topic here." Robert cut in, redirecting the discussion again to exactly the point he wanted to make. He couldn't let it ever drop without having made it. "That's not what always happens, anyway. Someone's perception of reality and the actual reality are rarely the same thing. Sarcasm only helps reinforce thoughts that are already wrong."

Felicity shrugged. "Yeah, but people tend to instinctually come up with ways to help them deal with stuff that make them feel bad. I mean, I think that's basic human nature."

"Not every time." Donna interjected smoothly. "Some people chose to face their fears."

Felicity nodded, but didn't relent. "And when that doesn't change anything, you make up other ways to cope. Which are just as valid."

"And that includes running away from the problem?" his mother asked, dethatched and smooth.

"If it helps. I mean, usually problems tend to be in a lot better shape than the people doing the running, but yeah."

"Seems an escapist way of looking at things."

Felicity just shrugged.

It was about then that Raisa walked, she and her two helpers for the day distributing the second course. One that Thea scrunched up her nose at and Felicity looked at with the kind of suspicion that was, frankly, hilarious.

"Umm… mom."

"Yes baby."

"What is this?"

Oliver bit back his smile and didn't dare look at Tommy or he knew he'd melt.

"Those are snails. They were brought here straight from the coast." Moira explained patiently.

Felicity's eyes went wide.

"They?"

"Yes."

"You said 'they'?"

Donna sighed. "Felicity."

"Food is not supposed to have pronouns!" Felicity whisper shouted and that was it. Oliver couldn't hold back his laughter anymore and Tommy didn't even try. Surprisingly, Robert joined too.

"They actually taste good you know." Oliver told her. She gave one look to the way he was extricating the snail from the shell and gagged subtly.

"No thanks."

"So where did you say Malcolm was, anyway?" she asked as she pushed her plate away from her just a bit, as if those few inches would create a safety distance.

"Away on business."

"Location-stop a secret?"

Tommy met Oliver's eye across the table and they both bit back smiles.

"Russia, baby."

"So Malcolm's firm insures Communists now?"

"I don't think Malcolm knows any Communists." His father said, his tone perfectly serious. Donna looked at him and Moira both, a bit startled.

Felicity smiled nervously, as if she'd just remembered where she was.

"I know, Mr. Queen, I was just…"

"Joking. She was joking of course, Robert." Donna added amiably. Felicity jolted a bit almost imperceptibly and Oliver bit her lip because he was sure that Donna had just kicked her daughter's shin under the table.

"Hard to tell." Oliver murmured just before taking a sip off his glass of wine trying to hide his smile. Tommy hummed while Thea masked her laugh with a cough.

Oliver looked over at his mother, but from the look on her face he really couldn't tell if she was amused or annoyed. It might have been a little bit of both at this point. Donna and Felicity in a room together tended to have that effect on her.

"Oh wait." Mora said suddenly, taking the attention of the whole table on herself. "Rudolf Godfried."

"Bless you." Felicity said immediately and if she'd been closer he would have pinched her.

"Too right. He was a Stalinist that we knew. I'd forgotten."

Felicity's face fell, her fork stopping midway to her mouth. You could hear a pin drop in the room but his mother dint seem to notice at all.

His dad didn't seem to notice though.

"Oh yes, we did didn't we! We stayed with him once in Munich." he added jovially. "Lovely old gentleman."

"Very interesting stories." His mother added, nodding.

Felicity followed the exchange like it was a game of tennis and the ball was a decapitated head.

"Are you kidding?"

"Felicity." Donna cautioned. In vain, as usual.

"You socialized with a known Stalinist? That's gross, dude."

His mother's smile was subtle, but he knew that look: she was very please with herself. "No dear. That was a joke."

Felicity blinked and met Oliver's eyes from across the table and then Tommy's, who was just as surprised as she looked. Thea was the first one to laugh this time and she took both their parents and Tommy with her. Even Oliver couldn't resist.

Felicity finally rolled her eyes and gave in to her smile.

"Yeah ok, that was cute."

Everyone got back to their food – and then Felicity flinched so hard that she almost fell off her chair.

"Oh my god, it moved. I think one of them is still alive."

Oliver almost choked on his sip of wine. His nose would burn for a few days and his throat would be on fire but it would be worth it.

o

He went out with Tommy and Laurel later. Felicity didn't want to join them – she'd rather hang out with her mother some, she said, and it took a bit of stretching for Oliver to grasp that concept as normal for them. And it wasn't like she could join them anyway, since no matter what fake ID they could concoct for her there was no way she could pass for anything other than a kid.

Tommy and Laurel lost themselves not that long after. Oliver didn't mind, he could find his own company, he was good at that.

Three different drinks into the night he dragged himself to the bathroom and leaned against the door as tried to find her number.

She answered at the second ring.

"What?"

It made him smile. She always answered her phone that way. Kinda rude, always deadpan, but open to the conversation at the same time.

"It really hurts my feelings, by the way, that you didn't get me a souvenir." He said, continuing the conversation he'd been having in his head.

"Queen?"

"No, Prince."

"I doubt he has my number."

"Your deflecting is transparent."

"Your tipsiness is random."

He laughed. "Says the girl who at 14 proclaimed herself the mayor of Randomville."

She groaned. "Oh my god, I can't believe you remember that."

But he could hear her smiling.

"I remember you were wearing the most ridiculous pink dress I'd ever seen."

"Ugh, leave me alone!"

"You looked like a fruity drink."

"I swear to god Queen!" She warned, but she didn't hang up on him so he took that as a good sign.

"You got Thea a MIT notebook."

"You hate taking notes. And you would have been totally mad at me for getting you a drawing notebook cause you like to think nobody knows you like to draw stuff."

"And you got Tommy and you mom matching sweatshirts!" maybe he whined a little bit. Maybe. He was drunk, I didn't count.

"Like you'd ever wear a sweatshirt, mister 'I dress like a fratboy ask me how' Queen."

"I would have worn one if you got it for me."

"Yeah right."

"What, I would have!"

"Fine Queen, fine! I'll mail you a sweatshirt!"

"One bought especially for me."

"Oh my god."

"Can you have my name printed on it too?"

"Why, are you in danger of forgetting it anytime soon?"

"I like being prepared." He said, thinning his voice to a girlish pitch to better imitate her.

"Bite me."

"Hey wait… how do you know I draw?" he said, blinking, rubbing a hand up and down his face.

"I'm a witch, I know everything."

"And what's wrong with how I dress anyway?"

"What? What are you… Oliver, are you okay?"

He was… confused… but he was also aware that she sounded very serious all of a sudden and he was in no mood for serious conversations.

"Fine, since everyone's a critic, we're going shopping tomorrow. You can help me."

"What?!"

"Three pm good for you?"

"I'm not going shopping with you Queen! What the fresh hell?"

"Good! Great! Bye!

"Oliver! I hate shopping."

"Too bad."

"Oliver, I will steal all your left shoes!"

But he hung up and left the bathroom cackling at his own ingenuity.

Ho woke up the next day in a gorgeous brunette's bed at noon. He left breakfast for her and got coffee for himself and Felicity both before meeting her, plus a giant tub of ice-cream, because he wasn't sure how he'd praised it the night before but he liked going on the safe lane and showing he was sorry anyway.

She came shopping with him the next day, which he was surprised at but also glad because he'd been right: she did make chores fun.

And she made good on her promise to steal all his left shoes and hide them around Queen Manor. He had the not so subtle doubt that Thea had had a lot to do with that.

It took him a month to find them, by the end of it he'd end up laughing at the random places they'd been hidden.

(His souvenir came through the mail two weeks later. She'd gotten him a pink elephant the size of his head. He had an even pinker jacket on and farted when you squeezed him. Something his mother discovered when she accidentally sat on him.

Oliver laughed about it for five minutes straight.)

o

He didn't mean to listen in, but he didn't move away either.

"I'm worried about her, Tommy."

"I know you are."

"I mean… didn't she seem different to you?"

He'd never heard her sound like that, and it kinda freaked him out a little bit. She sounded unsure and small and scared.

It was strange to think about it that way, but he'd thought nothing could have scared Felicity.

"I don't know… I love Donna, but I don't know her like you do, Felicity."

There was silence and what sounded like a sight.

"She's so thin. And she's going on and on about exercise. I mean I'm trying not to take it personally, but I think she told me I should lose some weight."

"Felicity, come on."

"Which is weird, ok, cause that's not something my mom would tell me ever."

She didn't sound like she believed it though, because her voice shook.

Oliver moved away as quietly as he could, holed himself in the living room where he was supposed to wait for them to come down and for Laurel. He thought back at Donna and her bird-like fingers, and her strained smiles and the looks she sometimes gave Malcolm, and felt his insides howling out with the weight of his dread.

So he stopped thinking about it.

o

"So!" Tommy flopped on the sofa right next to Laurel, who leaned into him with a smile. Felicity didn't even look up from her furious typing when she answered.

"So, what?"

"So, are you coming to live with us this semester or what?"

Felicity looked up, eyes wide and mouth just a little bit too round for her surprise to be honest.

"Wow, that was just… so sudden, Tommy, I mean… You've only just come back and you know Laurel and I are friends but we should really talk about stuff before you invite me into unto- hey watch my baby!"

Because Tommy threw a pillow at her head and she had to throw her arms out to catch it before it touched her computer. She threw it at him and missed by half a mile, flying over both Tommy's and Laurel's head.

"Pathetic." Oliver commented.

"Bite me."

"I'm serious Felicity." Tommy said then, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looking at her so intensely as if he thought that would get her to look up from the screen of her laptop.

Oliver had tried closing it against her will once. She'd almost bitten off one of his fingers and not spoken a single word to him for a month.

He'd never tried again. There were very few faster ways to piss Felicity off than to close the lid of her laptop and pull her headphones out.

"I'm serious too." She finally said, looking up. "I like where I live, it's nice. I have friends and it's basically inside campus. I don't want to move."

"You'll have to next year. They don't let you keep dorm rooms for longer than a year." Oliver reminded her. By the irritation on her face, she already knew. "And our place is five minutes from your campus building."

"Which is the reason why I picked it out in the first place." Tommy reminds her. "You need a place, we got the space, where is the problem."

"Isn't some guy living with you right now?"

Laurel snorted. "They'll kick Finn out. He won't care."

"And you've got friends staying over all the time." She tried again.

Oliver smirked at her. "Walls are soundproof."

"Ew, gross." She shoved at his arm without managing to move her one bit. He might have said something to that but then he remembered he was talking to a kid who was 15 seconds over seventeen, and who was practically Tommy's sister - and found himself repeating Felicity's words in head.

"I promise not to be a jerk when you start dating."

Felicity narrowed her eyes at Tommy just as Laurel slapped his arm.

"Ouch!"

"If you expect a reward for enacting normal social behavior and not being a Neanderthal, a slap is all you're getting." Laurel deadpanned.

"Harsh."

"Truth always is."

"Besides, I don't date. College dudes are gross." Felicity said under her breath.

Oliver exchanged a look with Tommy and Laurel and they were all immediately at attention, especially Laurel who sat up straight and leaned a bit forward.

"Felicity, has anyone bothered you?"

Felicity looked up, smiling. "Relax, it was just a general statement, not a specific one."

"Oh. Right. You're definitely not wrong there, though."

"I object to that." Tommy threw in, trying to lighten the mood. Oliver didn't object at all – he actually shared the sentiment.

"Noted."

Felicity thought about it for a long while and Tommy and Oliver let her, turning the conversation to other stuff while she made her mind at her own pace.

"I'm paying you rent." She finally said, interrupting a heated debate on the best venue to set their new year party.

"Aw, Felicity, come on."

"I'm paying you rent, that's my only condition."

Oliver sighed. "Felicity, the apartment is paid for, for a year. There is no rent."

"I'll pay rent to you, not Malcolm, or Robert. No offense to your father, Oliver."

"None taken."

"So, we got a deal?" Tommy asked her and Felicity rolled her eyes at him.

"Yeah Merlyn, we got a deal. Oh, note of warning though: If any one of you leaves shit around for me to pick up, I'll set it on fire."

* * *

[1] post/150413083312/if-you-think-about-it-all-these-thinkpieces-about

[2] post/150818626097/ycontuespiritu-prokopetz-if-the-great


	8. Chapter 8

What she didn't tell her mother – nor anyone – was that her first semester at MIT sucked. She liked that she was learning things she'd never known and that she was actually testing her limits, but she was also really lonely. Which was why studied so hard and took extra credits - she didn't really want any free time to wallow.

It wasn't anyone's fault really. Most people were nice, but she didn't feel like talking to anyone who didn't talk to her first. And there were assholes, sure, but assholes weren't exactly and extinct breed, so that didn't faze her. And she did get into a few cool study groups.

The truth was that those first few months, Felicity missed home so much it hurt - and that had surprised her, considering how much she'd wanted to get away.

Home…

She felt like she hadn't had a home in years, but she missed her mom, and Tommy. Thea and Oliver too. She missed talking girly with Laurel and laughing about stupid stuff with Sara, when she came over. All this time she'd thought she had friends, but in truth she only had family. Everyone else outside them was temporary.

Suddenly waking up to that made her miss them more than Felicity had been prepared to handle.

It got better when Tommy got back from London and Oliver made Harvard his college number three, though. Moving in with them had been the best idea she'd had in a while.

She filled her room at the apartment with books and random electronic junk. The boys didn't mind. They didn't say anything about the blankets and afghans she obsessively collected, or stuffed animals she left around the apartment either - though Felicity was convinced Oliver laughed on the inside every time he saw her hugging one of them as she studied or coded. Sometimes he laughed on the outside too, the jerk. She'd usually threw at his head whatever she had in her hand at the time– usually pens. And that big dork kept the stuffed pink elephant she'd trolled him with on the couch in the living room too, front and center. He introduced Dumbo by name to anyone who came over and nobody was allowed to touch him but Oliver.

Felicity would steal him and carry him around just to get on his nerves.

She celebrated her seventeenth birthday with them. They had dinner together and then they took her out barhopping. She met a lot of Harvard jerks that night who talked to her like she needed shit explained to her, but the girls were nicer. She flirted with at least three who really seemed to like flirting back, and that part was awesome.

She still took on more than she could chew when it came to her studies, but she loved finding out that it wasn't like that at all – that she couldhandle it. That she could come on top of it. It was such a thrill, actually! She organized and made timetables and filed a request to take on two majors the moment she started her second semester, because yes, she did know exactly what she wanted. Maybe she didn't make nearly as many friends as perhaps she should have, but who cared? She wasn't alone.

No, she really wasn't.

"Oh my god!" Felicity yelped, hands fluttering over her heart, barely holding in a scream at finding Oliver Queen laying on her carpet, an hour past midnight.

She'd known he was in the apartment, because when she walked to the coffeemaker to prep it for tomorrow at 7 am, she saw that it had already been set. Tommy was away for the weekend visiting Laurel, and unless a particularly thoughtful robber had broken in, then the only explanation was that Oliver was home.

But she didn't expect to find him in her room!

Oliver groaned and threw his arm over his eyes so she turned the light off. Her hand shook a little because of the fright, but she calmed down with deep breaths.

"If one day I die of a heart attack, I swear you'll be the first person I'm going to haunt." She hissed.

Oh she was so tired, she didn't have the energy for this at all…

"Sorry."

Felicity let both her bags drop to the ground and rolled her shoulders to relive the ache. She walked into her room without turning the lights on again.

"Couldn't find your room?" She asked in a whisper as she knelt down next to him.

"Your carpet's more comfortable."

Felicity rolled her eyes. Oliver was the cuddly kind of drunk – she'd found that out a while ago, but usually he hogged her blankets, not her carpet. She poked at his shoulder with a finger and he didn't even seem to feel it.

"Wow… how drunk are you right now?"

He smiled without opening his eyes. "Well, before there were two of you, so I'd say pretty drunk."

"Huh. Isn't it a bit early in the night for you to be this drunk?"

"Started early."

She sighed. "Figures."

"Y'sound tired."

Felicity sighed and flopped on the carpet too, side by side with him, staring at the moonlit patterns on the dark ceiling. Her back ached from being curved over books for the last 11 hours and she was just so drained that she felt a little numb. The only upside to this whole day had been that she'd gone into it braless.

"I'm exhausted." A moment more lying there and she might just fall asleep. "Huh, you were right, this carpet is comfy."

It wasn't really, but she was tired enough to sleep on it anyway which was probably Oliver's logic too. Oliver moved to his side and the plush toy he was using as a pillow farted.

Felicity melted into giggles. "Are you using Dumbo as a pillow?"

He just hummed.

"On behalf of all the Farting Stuffed Toys Association, I am offended."

"I'll send an apology note."

She felt her limbs get heavy and she was almost half asleep when she felt like she was falling and jolted awake again, only to find herself dozing on her carpet next to a drunk Oliver Queen.

"Wow, no, no." Floor-sleeping was a bad, bad decision that she would regret in the morning. Felicity pulled herself up and pushed at Oliver's shoulder.

"Oliver, get up."

"Hmm no."

"Get up, come on. You can sleep on my bed and I'll take yours."

"You said we weren't 'llowed to pass out on your bed."

"I'll make an exception for one time. This one time." She took his hand and pulled. "Come on."

"Nope. 'm fine here."

"Trust me, the hangover tomorrow will be punishment enough without neck cramps from weird sleeping positions."

He giggled. "Sleeping positions."

He slurred his S-s a little bit and it was kind of funny.

"Yes, dirty, I know. Get up."

He sighs, then peels his eyes open and gives her this stupid puppy-eyed look that made him look twelve.

"Will you give me one of your blankets?"

"Nice of you to ask this time."

"I like the orange one."

"The one with the pink polka-dots or the one with the yellow stripes."

"Yellow stripes."

"I'm using that one."

"Felicity…" He whined and she finally gave in with a laugh.

"Fine, fine, you can have it."

Oliver managed to scrap himself off the carpet and get on his feet, groaning at the effort. He wobbled and Felicity slipped under one of his arms, throwing it around her shoulders to support some of his weight for the three steps it would take him to reach her bed. He leaned into her a little too much though, and Felicity grunted under his weight.

"Geez you're heavy. Are you sure this is all muscle?"

His chest rumbled with low laughter. "You calling me fat?"

"I'm calling you drunk."

He found his feet then and all of a sudden pulled her close and held her tight with the arm she'd propped around her shoulders to hold him up. She thought she felt him drop a kiss somewhere along the top of her head too. It was sweet and unexpected, and Felicity didn't know what to make of it, because the next moment he'd flopped on her bed and rolled, hugging her pillow under his head and smothering half his face against it and taking a big breath.

"Sounded like fat to me."

"So sensitive." She drawled, tucking her orange blanket he'd wanted around his shoulders.

"I try not to show it."

She shook her head. "Shut up and go to sleep Queen, geez."

He chuckled. "Always has to have the last word."

"I do not!"

She really did though, it was a compulsion.

With the streetlight and the moonlight coming in through the window just over the bed, Felicity could see his face fairly clearly. She looked at him for a few more minutes, feeling a frown coming over her face, but then shook her head, called herself stupid and got up.

She dragged her feet to her cupboard, changed into her comfiest cotton PJs and a T-shirt and then used what was left of her energy to walk to Oliver's room and slip between the covers of his bed.

She squirmed a little until she felt comfortable, and expected it to take her a while to fall asleep because it took her ages to get used to a new bed. But she must have been really burned out, because she didn't even realize she'd closed her eyes until she opened them the next morning. And though she'd always felt weird about sleeping in other people's beds, when she woke up that morning to the familiar scent Oliver's favorite aftershave and freshly made coffee, she smiled.

o

"Why don't you ever call me Ollie?"

Felicity turned to him, confusion visible in the line of her frown.

"What?"

"You call me Queen and you call me Oliver and that's it. And I was just wondering."

"Is this a trick question?"

He shrugged at her. "Just a question."

Felicity pulled her feet off the coffee table and folded them beneath her, turning to look at him.

"Your family calls you Ollie. Tommy, Thea, Laurel. Even Sara."

"Yeah, so?"

He really didn't seem to get it, did he?

"So it seemed like it was 'friends only' kinda thing and I didn't really know you." She said, hands gesturing in front of her. "And then I sort of thought that you didn't really like me, so it would have felt weird, like overstepping or something. And after that, I was sort of used to calling you Oliver, so it stuck."

He didn't say anything, just kept looking at her, so she finally prodded him.

"What?"

"It's not that I didn't like you. I was a little worried about how much Tommy was getting attached."

Felicity smiled. "'Cause you thought me and my mom would be temporary, and then we'd leave and he'd lose a family all over again. Is that it?"

He looked away from her and back to the Fellowship of the Ring onscreen, his face unreadable. "Something like that, yeah."

"You hated having to share Tommy with me, didn't you." She said around a laugh and Oliver huffed, shifting in his seat. She could tell even through the light of the TV that he was blushing.

"I noticed, you know. which is why I didn't hog him all the time." But she was teasing now, cause as long as they were getting things out in the open, they might as well say everything, right.

"Well, first my sister, then my best friend. Is it any wonder I didn't trust you."

Felicity gasped. "Oliver Queen! Were you jealous?"

He hit her with one of the pillows he'd been leaning against and Felicity squealed.

"Shut up." But he was smiling.

o

When Oliver dropped out of Harvard, Felicity had a moment of blind fear that Tommy would leave too, to go wherever Oliver went, and that she was going to be left all alone in a huge apartment and a really cold city.

But Tommy didn't leave and in the end, though Oliver jumped over to the Northwestern, he still ended up at their apartment more often than not.

Sometimes he and Tommy partied until morning, sometimes they holed up in the apartment and kept her company, or picked her up at the library and drove around for hours. Oliver always seemed as cheerful as ever, like nothing at all bothered him, but sometimes he'd just sit and be quiet for hours and Felicity worried a little. Maybe.

She tried talking to him a few times, and sometimes he talked back, sometimes he deflected.

He always seemed happy to see her though, and always made coffee for her before he left, because he knew she liked his best, though she'd never admitted it.

o

She spent that summer – her first college summer – bouncing from her house to Queen Manor and back again, traveling around Starling with her mother having brunch every day at a different restaurant. Tommy was with Laurel most of the time so Felicity ended up going at the Queen Manor and hanging out with Oliver a lot.

Oliver didn't really like going to the beach, so she and Thea settled for floating in the Queen's swimming pool, soaking in the sun. Oliver didn't swim either – he hated it actually - but he did hang around the pool sometimes when he was around, watching her and Thea fool around in the water, trying to dodge the splashes they sent his way every now and then.

One day she dragged him to her garage at the back of the Merlyn estate, and showed him her grandpa's 1980 Ducati 900SS, just to enjoy the stupidly surprise look on his face.

"I've been trying to fix it up since forever."

Oliver walked around the bike, looking at it like it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. "Yeah, Tommy told me you would hide out here for hours sometimes."

"I'm not too bad but I'm not a real mechanic either. But this year I met this guy in Electrical Engineering who was practically a genius and he and a couple of friends of his helped me fix it up."

He gave her one of this lopsided smiles that didn't quite look like a smile to her anymore now that she knew what an actual smile looked like on his face.

"Oh yeah? Out of the kindness of his heart?"

"Out of his need to impress me, actually. It got him a pretty sweet date, so I'd say we're even."

Oliver laughed.

"Well, I hope he showed you as good a time as he showed this baby. She looks brand new."

Felicity cringe. "Nope. My bike got all the luck."

That seemed to get his attention and Felicity immediately regretted ever bringing it up. She got awkward when discussions about boys opened up.

"How so?"

She just shrugged, fiddled with her phone.

"I dunno, I just got the feeling that he didn't even like me that much? He kept interrupting me when I talked and I know that I talk a lot, okay, and I go on these weird tangents sometimes and it can get annoying-"

"It's not. It's cute."

Felicity shifted on her feet uncomfortably. "Yeah, if you say so."

"I do."

The way he made it sound so final made her roll her eyes and finally smile a little.

"Thanks."

"Did you pretend to go to the bathroom and jump out the window in the back?"

This time she laughed. "I should have, but no. He just seemed really impatient to get out of the restaurant. So we did, but that didn't change anything. And he kept talking about his major and stuff, which was cool, but he also looked at me like I didn't know what I was talking about when I tried to give an opinion. Yeah, it was just bad."

"I hope you gave him a kick in the nuts instead of a goodbye kiss."

She snorted but he seemed so serious that the smile melted off her face.

"No. but there was no goodnight kiss either. I kind of want the people I kiss to at least like me, you know."

"Yeah, I know." Oliver said softly, coming to stand where she had been, leaning against the wall, and so close to her that her arm brushed with his. It was his way of providing comfort, usually, since he had no idea how to go about it otherwise.

It was sweet, Felicity thought. Oliver could be really sweet sometimes.

"Didn't you have two of these?" He nodded towards the bike. "I think Tommy might have said that to me once, but I also might have been high."

"I did. The other one was my dad's though, so I broke it down and donated the parts."

It didn't seem to surprise him as much as she thought it would. He still asked though.

"Why'd you do that?"

"'Cause fuck him, that's why." She turned to him with a big fake smile on her face. "Wanna try it out for a ride?"

He said yes, of course.

It became their thing, that summer. (strange… was it strange' she never thought of it that way) Instead of car-rides to the jetty, they'd take the bike and drive even further out, go sit somewhere quiet and just stay there for a while, when they both got tired of the city and wanted to feel like they were escaping, but without going too far.

It was an illusion and out of the two of them Felicity was the one who saw through it. Because she only needed a respite. Oliver was the one who kept chasing an escape and stopping halfway.

o

"Why do you keep dropping out?"

Oliver flinched. "Whoa Smoak, don't hold back on my account."

She made a face at him. "I hold back on no one's account."

"I've noticed."

The sun was setting, painting with gold the trees around Queen Manor and reflecting off the surface of the pool. They were both sitting on the grass, playing Go Fish, which was really not a hard game and it didn't explain how hard Oliver was no concentrating on his cards.

"Well?"

"Maybe I just can't keep up, ever thought about that?"

"I did." The unaffected look on his face slipped and she knew she'd touched a nerve. "Called bullshit on it about two seconds after I thought about it. I know you're smart. And I know that you've passed every exam you've sustained with flying colors, so what gives?"

His face fell.

"What? How do you… Did Tommy tell you that?" He was frowning and it was one of the rare times he actually looked upset.

"No."

"No, he didn't because he couldn't have. Nobody knows my grades."

"I… heard your dad talking about it to your mom." She admitted, feeling the heat crawling up her neck and burning her cheeks.

"Snooping, Smoak? You know what they say about people who eavesdrop."

Felicity licked her lips. "I didn't drop any eaves. I just… couldn't help it?"

"Ah." He said then and looked away, staring out to the water. "They were fighting again, huh."

"It was kinda loud. Thea was by the pool so she didn't hear anything." She hurried to explain. "But I wanted some water and when I passed through the living room I heard them."

Oliver didn't say anything but his eyes were narrow and his lips thin with anger.

"I took Thea out for ice-cream right after and invited her to stay over that night."

Oliver let out a long breath. "Thank you."

"It's fine."

"I don't like university, and I like living without options even less." he said quietly after a pause so long that Felicity had thought he wouldn't answer at all.

"What does that mean?"

He huffed an unhappy laugh. "It's a dick move isn't it? Rich white boy complaining about his lack of options." He dragged one hand down his face flopped back in the grass, closing his eyes. "But all I see is one door and I'm being shoved through it."

Oh… this was about his parents. About Robert…

"So you're doing what? Stalling?"

He gave a half-hearted shrug.

"You know you could just tell him to leave you alone right? That you're going to do whatever you want. Change majors, take the classes you like, don't go to college at all. Get a job till you figure out what you actually want. …I know your dad probably loves thinking this as much as Malcolm does, but he can't really make you do anything. That's the biggest lie ever."

She couldn't decide if the smile on his face right then was more sad or bitter, or an even mix of both.

"Not all of us are like you, Smoak." He said flatly. It sounded rather cold though and harsh the way only he could be, in that icily contained way that he probably learned from his mother.

"Okay." She hated how small her voice sounded, but he kinda hurt her feelings a little bit. Suddenly being out here at the edge of the city alone with him made her feel really stupid.

But a moment later she saw him shift up again from the corner of her eye and felt his hand on her shoulder, warm and heavy. When she looked up he was just looking at her, lips upturned and eyes soft.

"I didn't mean that. Not like that, anyway. I actually mean it as a compliment."

She held his eyes for long moments before she nodded. She didn't really believe him but that was her issue, not his.

o

Felicity had known from living with him for six months that for all his loud personality and ability to become the heart of any party, when he was alone, Oliver could actually became the quietest spot in the room. But she found out that summer that his moods could get a lot darker than she'd thought possible. That he started ripping his own life apart sometimes, to look at the insides, talking about his parents and their expectations, wondering why they were so judgmental and if he was exactly like them without even knowing it.

('Don't be absurd, you're not. You're nothing like your dad and… ok so maybe you've got that freaky 'did you, now?' glare-thing like Moira, but that's about it!'

'I do?'

'Kinda? You both have that cold intimidating thing going on but you usually do it like you're mocking people.'

'Huh. That's… not cool.'

'Not for people at the wrong end of it, no.')

And that maybe it was as simple as not knowing what you wanted. That maybe some people were never meant to find a purpose, something that meant anything to them – and were meant to spend their lives passing out on the carpets of people who actually did.

He'd given her this wistful look then, and spoken as if he was just thinking out loud: 'You really don't have that problem though, do you?'

He'd sounded so sad that Felicity had felt like giving him a hug. But she'd also been angry as hell at him for thinking so low of himself too.

(She'd been way out of her depth and neither new it.)

'Ok, so I know what I'm good at - and I'm lucky, 'cause I also happen to love doing what I'm good at. But I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself after MIT either, Oliver. Life is not supposed to be all planned out. There's nothing wrong with that.'

He'd given her the most miserable smile in the world then and got up with a soft 'guess so'. Turned around with a bright, fake smile she'd seen on his face before and a cheery 'goodnight' and hadn't come back home for a week - until he made it to TMZ for being so drunk in public that he'd went and peed on a cop car.

For about two more years Felicity wouldn't be able to get rid of the gnawing doubt that it had been something she'd said that made him spiral that way.

o

It was that summer that Felicity started to pain her nails black and realized that she actually liked it. Sara was very enthusiastic about the subtle shift in style and Thea wanted to go all out and buy a whole new wardrobe. Felicity didn't like to go that far, but she definitely considered some new necklaces and even bought a black bikini that she was too embarrassed to wear anywhere around people.

The truth was that summer really freaked her out in some ways, though she couldn't seem to fully grasp why.

There was something so off with her mom, Felicity could see it, but nobody else seemed to be able to. Her dresses were cheerier than ever and her smiles so bright they must hurt her face, but there was just something so… so vacant about her eyes. Sometimes she Felicity could see she was just about to cry and would blink fast to hold it back. And after she would just wave it away and tell her that she was fine and nothing was wrong, no matter how much Felicity insisted. Her mother had never been the kind of woman to change her dresses five times before she found the right one either. She'd always known what she liked and never been shy about taking it, so the change confused Felicity.

And then there was that time when they were going out for dinner and Malcolm asked her 'is this is really what you want to wear' in that tone of his Felicity hated, and Donna had gone back and changed immediately… leaving Felicity feeling capable of bloody murder.

That night, when she'd asked for a second helping of pasta, Malcolm had smiled that serpentine smile of his and asked her if she was sure she was still hungry.

Felicity looking into his eyes a long moment before saying yes. She had two more helpings just to spite him and didn't even regret it despite the stomach ache.

Every time she tried talking to her mother about it, Donna got angry and defensive. The more she tried, the more distant her mother became and eventually the brunches stopped and they started arguing.

In September, Felicity left two weeks earlier than she had to, just to get away from it all. Family was easier to love when it was far away.

o

Felicity was flopped over the side of the couch, black hair stringy and obscuring half her face. Out of the three of them, she seemed the most relaxed one. Tommy was especially tense and Oliver too wasn't exactly having a good time. He knew all Felicity cared about was the university and it wasn't like they were kicking her out, though Malcolm and Donna probably would have to make some kind of 'donation' to help facilitate the forgetting of this incident.

Maybe that was the thought that had put the thunderous frown on Felicity's face.

For a kid who hated being alone, she hated depending on anyone for anything just as much.

There was something going on with her, Oliver could tell, but she wouldn't talk to anyone about it. Not to him – which had kinda hurt his feelings – and not to Tommy, or Thea, or Laurel. He'd even asked Sara just to be sure and she had no idea either.

He was worried about her but didn't know what to do about it. After what happened tonight, he also got the first taste of what his parents must have felt when he pulled all the stupid dangerous shit that he had in the past – and still might still revisit.

Well, at least they would have, if they had cared.

And Oliver did care.

He crouched in front of her. "Hey."

She peeled her eyes open. They were supposed to wake her up every two hours tonight. She didn't have a concussion but that was still a head wound she was sporting and those were never fun.

"Brought you some water."

She righted herself on the couch. "Thank you."

She took small sips, like a little bird, and then handed the glass back over to him. She wouldn't look at either him or Tommy in the face and had threaded her fingers through the little hole on her right sleeve so many times that it had ripped.

"I…" her voice broke, but she cleared her throat and tried again. "I'm really sorry."

Tommy sighed and slid down the couch, put an arm around her shoulders. She went with him, though she still wouldn't look up from her lap.

"It's okay, Felicity."

"You don't have to say that."

"No he doesn't." Oliver said. "But it's still okay."

She sniffed, passed a hand under her eyes.

Jesus.

"I thought it would be fun. I didn't think everyone would freak out about it so much."

"Nobody's freaking out." Oliver said gently. And it was actually true, for once. "The only freaking out moment of the evening was when the dean was worried you might be hurt. But you're not. You're gonna be fine, so everything's fine."

"That easy huh?" She said and finally, there was the hint of a smile on her face.

Oliver shrugged. "Guess so."

The door burst open and Tommy jerked in surprise and looked over his shoulder to where Malcolm walked in, black coat floating behind him. Felicity though just sighed and reached for the painkillers on the table.

She had a cut on her forehead from where she'd slipped and fallen and her head probably hurt like a bitch. She looked like hell too, her hair all a mess of black curls, pale as death and with a big gauze patched on her forehead. She was in pajamas, but hadn't showered yet so there were two little dots of blood just on her collarbone. Out of everything else, those two little dots of red against her skin were what made Oliver the most nervous so he avoided looking at them.

Whatever he felt though, Felicity probably felt worse. Getting a lecture now wasn't the best time, but one look at Malcolm and Oliver knew that that wouldn't really save her from one.

"Well, it seems that being around these two has finally rubbed off on you."

Felicity sighed, didn't even look at him. "Hello to you too, Malcolm."

Tommy gritted his teeth and his father looked at him.

"May we have the room?" Malcolm asked through gritted teeth. "Felicity and I need to have a discussion in private."

She groaned. "What, Malcolm, did I do something wrong?"

Tommy looked at Felicity as if asking her for permission to leave, but she was too busy popping another pill in her mouth.

Malcolm's sigh was pure exasperation. "And just what are you talking?"

"Roofies."

"Aspirins." Tommy corrected, throwing her a look as he got up.

Felicity got up too and headed for the other side of the living room where she got herself a glass of water, brushing by Malcolm without even looking at him. Oliver and Tommy went to the other room and they couldn't really see anything. Tommy didn't fully close the door though so Malcolm's voice still reached them.

"Please sit down."

"I'd rather stand."

"Sit."

"No."

There was a tense moment of silence.

"I try to understand you, I truly do, but sometimes your behavior just baffles me.

"I understand living the full 'student' experience. It's fine. And I might even tolerate you being around with these… street-rats, which is worse, but getting caught up in their stupidity? You are supposed to be smarter than this."

"I would take you more seriously if your one objection to my friends wasn't their bank account."

"Do not you put words in my mouth young lady." Malcolm warned, his voice deepening and Oliver saw Tommy tense even more, where he was standing there by the door, as if he was prepared to go through it at any moment.

"Breaking and entering? Grand theft auto?"

"Oh my god, we just move the car fifteen yards!" Felicity protested.

Well… technically she and a couple of others had dismantled the Dean's car and reassembled it in the Physics building, but you know - details.

From the outside, Oliver thought the whole thing was kinda funny, but Tommy wasn't as amused now as he'd been when he'd found out, and he'd become even less amused when they'd had to go get Felicity at the hospital because she'd run from the guards of the building, slipped and almost cracked her head open.

It seemed even less funny now with Malcolm yelling in the other room.

"I don't care if you'd driven the thing off a cliff! If you want to be stupid enough to pull this juvenile shenanigans, fine! But at least I expect you not to get caught! How do you explain that?"

She didn't – not immediately.

"It was a mistake, ok."

"A mistake? That is what you want to call it? A mistake."

"Well I tried calling it Al, but it will only answer to mistake."

Oliver huffed a muted laugh and Tommy dropped his head on his hand. She didn't relent for a second, did she?

"You think this is funny? Are you going to pull an Oliver and drop out, start hopping around colleges leaving behind a trail of potential and disappointment."

Tommy looked up and at the same moment, Oliver looked away.

"Hey! Don't you dare…" Felicity lowered her voice and Oliver would bet that had been deliberate. "I decide what I do and how I waste my potential and I am none of your business, Malcolm."

"Your mother would be so disappointed."

Felicity didn't have a quick answer for that one, but she found one eventually.

"My mother can tell me herself, if that really is the case. You can leave now."

"Do not presume to tell me what I can and cannot do, young lady."

Oliver's head snapped up and this time, he felt the way Tommy had probable been feeling since they stepped into this room: like he was seriously thinking about crossing the door and get back out there again.

It wasn't the words, exactly. It was the way Malcolm said them. Like there was supposed to be some kind of action implied after them.

Felicity though – she either missed it or didn't give a fuck.

"Right back at ya, Mister Merlyn."

"You selfish girl! I fly over half the country to get you out of trouble and this is the treatment I get for my trouble?"

"I didn't - I never asked you to come here!" Felicity yelled, sounding good and angry. "Oliver and Tommy got me out of trouble, and I will see myself through whatever comes next. I don't need your help and I don't want it, because your gross way of hanging your so called 'good deeds' over people's head makes me sick."

Felicity's next words came just a couple of heartbeats later, and though they weren't calmer, at least she wasn't yelling anymore.

"Now, I'm going to bed. You can stay or you can leave, it's not really my problem."

They heard the door of her room slam shut and then the door of the apartment slam shut even harder. In the silence that came after, Tommy let go of a long breath.

"Wow…"

Yeah, Oliver thought. That was a about right.

o

His first semester at Boston University – his fourth Alma Matter in two years - started better than usual and he'd actually found that studying didn't bore him to tears or require about 10 times the energy that everything else did, when his tutor knew what he was doing.

The old dude with a beard thicker than his dad's, was a pretty fun kinda guy and his psychology class that Oliver took on just for kicks, was actually pretty fun. He kept calling Oliver a kinesthetic learner and coming up with the weirdest kind of ways to help him study. When he'd suggested doodling and studying with someone he liked, Oliver had thought the old fart was out of it, but he'd also said that Oliver didn't need to try harder. That he just needed to try different.

So Oliver did and… it actually worked?

When he managed to give five midterms and not fail a single one, Oliver felt like he might just conquer the world.

I should have told him something that the first person he'd wanted to tell was Felicity, but at the time it didn't, because right after that came wanting to tell Tommy too, and it had been like that for years.

o

Oliver leaned back against the chair and glanced around the apartment, all set up for their poker night. Finn and the guys were on their way.

"We really need to think of something though. It's her eighteenth birthday – it has to be something big."

Tommy snickered and passed him the beers. "Felicity doesn't like 'big'. She gets uncomfortable with 'big'."

Oliver rolled his eyes. "Fine, that it has to be special."

Tommy closed the fridge with his foot, giving him a strange contemplative look as he made his way to the table, as if he was confused and couldn't figure Oliver's shit out all of a sudden.

"What?" Oliver snapped.

Tommy's eyebrows pulled a little but then he shook it off. "Nah, nothing. And Ollie - chill. It's December – her birthday is in February for fucks sake."

"Yeah whatever. You know she plans everything out months in advance. We don't even know what she wants to do for her birthday! Isn't she dating some fucker from her Electronic Engineering class? We need to book the date."

"Book the date?" Tommy laughed and then turned his surprised smile to Oliver who had just sat on the couch and lifted his feet on the coffee-table. "How the hell do you remember who she's dating, anyway? She mentioned it like – once."

"I remember stuff." Oliver defended. "I remember you told me you were getting a blue scarf for Laurel and ended up getting a yellow one."

Tommy flipped him the bird.

"And isn't he supposed to be like, twenty one years old? Don't you think that's weird. Come one, you know it is."

"Felicity can watch out for herself, Oliver."

But Oliver could tell just from Tommy's tone that he didn't like that anymore than Oliver did.

"And she's not gonna thank either one of us for sticking our noses in her business, and you know it." Tommy warned.

Oliver knew that obviously. But he didn't have to like it.

o

He was on the phone with his mother, but even through that and the guys making a hell of a lot of noise – five dudes playing poker in a room was never a quiet idea – Oliver still heard her stumbling against the door and her muffled, colorful cursing as she tried to undo the locks.

"Okay. No mom, I have to go. No. Yes I did… Yeah, me too."

Felicity stumbled inside, pushing the door open with her hip, arms full of books… and for a blink-and-miss moment Oliver almost didn't recognize her.

Oh… ok…

He'd never seen her wearing so much black since he'd known her. It was a bit jarring.

And different.

They hadn't had the chance to meet a lot lately because he'd been busy with actual studying, in which he was being efficient for once, and she was in the middle of her second year and had just started and internship in Wayne Corp's Boston Offices. But still!

He hadn't thought it was possible for someone to change so much in four weeks!

"The delightful lady has returned!" Fin yelled just as Felicity dropped a couple of the books she'd been carrying and swore through her teeth again.

"Fin, how unfortunate. If you have gone anywhere near my computers, I'll break your fingers." she deadpanned as she set the books down on the table close to the door and couched to pick up the ones she'd dropped.

Oliver got to it just as she did, and when Felicity looked up, the surprise melted the annoyance right off her face. It took her a blink or two to get over it, and then she smiled so wide that her dimples showed, and he realized, right when she mouthed 'Hi' at him, that he'd missed her.

He watched her take off her gloves and leather jacket, the sweater beneath it, coming up in a faded Metallica T-shirt, and he couldn't get over how much he'd missed her… He'd really fucking missed her and he hadn't even known it until right then, because he'd never in his life missed anyone like that, so he hadn't known how to give a name to the oppressive feeling that had taken residence on top of his lungs for weeks.

Oliver had almost forgotten that he was still on the phone with his mother, but it was the mention of his father that got him to pay attention again.

"What? No, don't tell dad. Just don't, alright." He added, and his frustration was so transparent that his mother relented.

"I gotta go now. Yeah okay." He turned to Felicity. "My mother says hello."

Felicity leaned into the receiver. "Hello Mrs. Queen."

Oliver bit back his smile. "Bye mom."

He hung up and he just sort of stood there looking at her, feeling a strange sort of uncertainty come over him.

"Hey stranger." She said, poking at his chest with her index finger. "Been a while since you showed your stupid mug around here."

"Ben busy."

"Oh, have you? Did we fall down your list of priorities?" she put both hands over her heart and pouted. "You hurt my feelings, Queen."

"Oh, you've grown feelings now?"

She snorted. "Tried to. They withered."

"Too cold in Boston, I bet."

"Stop waltzing around me! Did you fall on some ditch or something? Broken fingers so that you couldn't even call, is that it?" she pulled at his thumb to make her point and he winced, just to tease her.

"I had finals, Smoak! Papers that needed delivering."

The teasing glint in her eyes dropped and she looked at him full of open anticipation for a moment. She didn't ask immediately, just bit her lip and nodded, pretending she didn't want to know as much as she did so that he could tell him if he wanted to, which was just… such a Felicity thing to do, and for some reason it made him smile.

So they stood there staring each other down, Oliver counting backwards in his head to see how long she would last.

He got as far as 8 before she slapped his chest with both hands.

"Oh, come on! Just tell me! I hate mysteries."

He laughed. "Passed all of them and I'm on time with two of my papers. I'll have to push back the deadline of the third, but the professor's ok with it."

Felicity squealed, jumping up and down. "Yes! Yes, yes, yes! I knew you could do it! I knew it!"

When she stepped towards him with her arms open it felt natural to wrap her in and hug her tight.

"I know you did."

She laughed as she stepped back, flushed with happiness and smiling brighter than ever.

"So what are Tommy's strays up to here anyway?" She asked looking around him. "Oh, poker night, huh?"

"Yup. Wanna join in?"

"Hey Queen! You know the rules: No chicks allowed." Finn yelled from the living-room and Felicity rolled her eyes. She swished further in the apartment, Oliver following in tow.

"Hi Felicity." Robert greeted with a wink.

"Hi losers. Hey Tommy."

"You hurt my feelings, Smoak." Robert teased.

"You mistake me for someone who cares."

She sat down on the chair Oliver pulled for her and straightened, waiting for her cards.

"You heard me." Finn warned her without any heat. Oliver gave him a much more serious silent warning but he knew it wouldn't mean anything to Finn.

"I did. But seeing that I'm a human being and not a chick, I don't think that'll be a problem." Felicity said in that sweet way of her that usually preceded a 'fuck you' of some kind.

Finn smiled wide and fake. "My apologies. No ladies allowed in the game."

Felicity tilted her head, eyes wide in fake innocence. "Is that a poker rule, or just a general life motto of yours, Monica?"

"Both, I believe." Finn answered with a smirk just as Oliver took his own seat between Felicity and Tommy.

"Well, seeing as you're in my house, you follow my rules. And my rules say I don't give a fuck about your rules, poker or otherwise. So deal me in, Cindy." She ordered and threw a wad of cash on the table.

Robert snickered and Colin outright laughed.

Finn just sighed. "How many times will I have to apologize for mistaking your name a couple of times, before you start calling me by mine? Ballpark figure."

"Just once. But you'll have to mean it."

"So, never then?"

"Guess so, Susannah." Felicity said shortly as she pulled her black hair into a ponytail. She'd straightened it but it was curling again because of the humidity outside.

Oliver and Tommy shared a look and a smile.

"Do you even know how to play?" Finn asked, though he was dealing her in.

"I can handle myself."

"Go Fish doesn't count, sweet-cheeks." Robert said with his full on 'flirt' face, complete with smirk and wink. Oliver felt his hand tightening around his corona and he had the very immediate and violent urge to chuck it at Robert's face.

Felicity narrowed her eyes at him, the dark lining around them making her glare even sharper. "Shut your hole and play, limp-dick."

And with that the game started. Felicity swiped Oliver's half-finished beer – she didn't like beer, it was why she always stole the last three inches of his - so he took a fresh one for himself.

By the end of the first hand, Felicity's chips had dwindle and Finn and Robert were having the time of their lives teasing her but she seemed like she didn't hear them at all.

After Tommy dealt to begin the second round, she seemed to get serious. Three hands later, and she had won back all her chips and annihilated the stacked chips of the others' with a pair of Aces, a straight, and the high card.

"Fucking hell on a carrot!" Finn whined. "Beginner's luck sucks!"

Felicity just grinned and stacked her chips in even little towers. Tommy was enjoying the hell out of this and kept laughing every time she swept the table. Felicity's eyes were bright with excitement and she hadn't stopped smiling since she started winning, but despite that it was impossible to see through her during the game.

Four hands later, she had gone through a glass of wine that Tommy got her, and narrowed her eyes at the last man on the table that hadn't folded.

"Come on Queen, your call. You gonna put in like a man or what?"

Oliver sighed.

"Fuck it." He said and threw in the last of his chips. Tommy clapped and rubbed his hands together, eyes alight.

"Whatdya got, Queen?"

"Flush!" he smiled, spreading his cards face-up on the table. Five pairs of eyes turned to Felicity, who held Oliver's eyes for a moment longer and then slammed her cards on the table.

"Read 'em and weep, weirdoes! Aces and eights!" she said, giggling.

"A full house? What the fuck?" Finn cried.

Tommy howled with laughter just as disbelieving groans and shouts filled the room. Oliver just looked at her like he'd never seen her before.

"That's right," She said, pulling in her chips.

Oliver narrowed his eyes at her, understanding starting to seep in and making him feel like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

"This isn't just beginner's luck. You play."

Felicity pressed her lips together and shrugged, giving him her best wide-and-innocent eyes, and effect somewhat ruined by the fact that she was smiling like a shark.

Tommy was wiping tears away from his face, trying to calm down, but every now and then barrages of laughter still escaped him.

"You just hustled us!" Robert said, throwing his cards on the table.

"No fucking way!" Collin wailed, standing up and pacing up and down in front of the table.

"Your own fault for assuming, methinks." Felicity said triumphantly. She'd just shaved them out of three hundred thousand dollars.

"Awesome plan, Queen. Bring a card shark to poker night," Robert complained, sullen like the sore loser he was.

"I didn't know!" Oliver said absently, still too surprised to sound like he meant it.

"Bullshit," Finn called

"I didn't!" Oliver insisted. "Though I'm starting to think Tommy did."

Tommy, still flushed with laughter, raised his hands up. "I didn't either. But I had a hunch."

"You forgot I'm a Vegas girl, Queen?" Felicity asked him softly.

"You were a kid when you left Vegas." Oliver protested. It just made her shake her head at him.

"I grew up in my mom's casinos, Oliver. Some things stick."

"Felicity, my love!" Colin called as he came around to her side and fell to his knees. "Marry me."

Oliver pushed at him with his foot. "Get the fuck up, idiot."

Collin ignored him though.

"My heart is yours, my darling. You are everything I want in a woman, complete with the unexpected but welcome Evanescence style choices."

Felicity looked at him with eyebrows high on her forehead.

"I… hate to miss out on a potential soulmate like you, Collin, but I'm gonna have to decline."

"Oh, my poor heart."

"Sorry."

Oliver was just about to grab Collin by the nape and get him up when his phone rang again. His finger was just over the Ignore button when he saw it was his mother again, and she already knew he was up. He'd promised not to avoid her anymore so he peeled his ass of the chair and sequestered himself to his old room just as Collin started to beg Tommy and Felicity that they take him back as a tenant.

When he got out five minutes later, Felicity was just coming out of her room. she'd changed into black jeans, boots and a turtleneck and she was just doing up her ponytail again, high on her head.

"Hey, where did you disappear to?"

"Long distance phone call." He said, showing her his phone.

Her lips were a darker shade of maroon – he noticed that when she smirked at him. "God?"

"Paris."

"God is in Paris?"

"No. My mother is in Paris."

"Wow, God is your mother?" She walked backwards to the entrance of the apartment, where her boots were. "I knew it!"

"Felicity…"

"So God is a woman. And your relative, that is so cool."

"Does she have an off button?" Robert asked.

Oliver threw the phone at his head.

"Hey! Do not abuse innocent tech!" Felicity gasped.

"Right. No worries about my head."

"Your head is replaceable, Robert." Oliver said icily. He was annoyed all of a sudden, though he didn't really know where it came from.

"You should totally ask for favors." Felicity continued.

"Robert?"

"No, god. Since she's a relative." She clarified as she laced up her boots.

Oliver sighed and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Though, you already are rich and pretty, so this confirms my suspicion that god is into nepotism as well. Great."

"What's the hurry?" he asked as she zipped up her sweatshirt and he helped her get into her leather jacket.

"Friends." She fixed her loose belt and looked at him through her lashes with a smile. "You think that one time I insulted your mother's draperies will come back to haunt me anytime soon?"

"I'd be prepared if I were you. Stay off any cars, boats, airplanes, just in case she decides to smite you."

"I'll hide in the nearest bathroom for a week, maybe she'll forget about me."

"Doubtful. If it had been Malcolm, however…"

She groaned. "Oh, Lucifer save us. Are you staying over tonight?"

Oliver shrugged.

He kind felt like getting shitfaced drunk the way he hadn't in a while and crawling into the pants of the nearest brunette actually. That was what he wanted, and the need for it creeping up his back in millipede legs made him feel like shit, for some reason.

"Oh come on, stay! Please? I won't be long and by the time I come back, the strays will have moved on and we can have wine and popcorns and you can listen to me complain about my internship for hours. It'll be fun."

"Sounds like it." Even to his own ears it sounded weak. "How was your internship, by the way?"

"Ugh, god." she exaggerated a shiver for effect. "I met Max Fuller the third day and spent the next four weeks showering."

Oliver grimaced.

"Come on Queen, stay over." her smile fell a little and he could see it in her eyes then, that she'd missed him too, though probably… yeah there was really no way it was the same. "Feels like forever since we actually talked."

Oliver tilted his head to the side with a smile. "Well since you said please."

Her face lit up. "I did, didn't I."

"I wish I had recorded it."

"You should have. You're not likely to hear it again anytime soon."

She was just at the door when she turned around and ran into him for an attack hug that lasted too little for him to actually reciprocate it.

The she ran back to the door, yelling 'I'll see you later' as she closed it behind her.

o

He wanted to stay. He really, really did. He wanted to sit back on the couch with her and talk the way they had that summer and he wanted to know everything he had missed these past few weeks and everything that had changed. He wanted to know how come she dressed all in black now and where she'd learned to do her make up like that. He wanted to stay so much... Which was why he drank half a bottle of scotch, debating with himself, and then decided he was enough of a shit and there was really no need to top it off by being a real-life asshole, as well as a recovering fuckup.

So he left and didn't even say sorry. He figured she would never forgive him.

Felicity didn't forgive people who left. She took them apart from her life and donated the parts


End file.
